The Hill News

The United States has huge unpaid bills coming due for its infrastructure. A generation of investments in world-class infrastructure in the mid-twentieth century is now reaching the end of its useful life. Cost estimates for modernizing run as high as $2.3 trillion or more over the next decade for transportation, energy, and water infrastructure. Yet public infrastructure investment, at 2.4 percent of GDP, is half what it was fifty years ago.

Congress has done little to address this growing crisis, as evidenced by the ongoing political fiasco over key infrastructure legislationâ€"the surface transportation authorization bill, also known as the highway bill. Historically a model of bipartisan cooperation, transportation funding is now the latest casualty of Tea Party extremism in the House of Representatives.

What makes the highway bill so important? For starters, it represents thousands of jobs for the beleaguered construction sector, which saw its unemploymen! t rate rise to 17.2 percent in March, twice the rate of overall unemployment. Just as important, it is exactly the kind of comprehensive legislation we need to guide strategic, long-term investments. It is the largest source of federal infrastructure spending, allocating hundreds of billions of dollars over several years for highways, rapid transit, and rail.

Read more...