Blog entry

New U.S. Census Data: Same Reality

Alex Carter — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:27:42 -0400

Newly released data by the United States Census Bureau continues to show how much President George W. Bush has ravaged the American economic landscape.

Since 2000, median income has decreased 1 percent. That decline is magnified by the higher costs for energy, food and other items during that period; what families could buy for a dollar in 2000 now costs $1.25.

For some racial and ethnic groups, the burden is even heavier. In 2007, the median income for white people was $54,920; the median income for African Americans was more than $21,000 less. Median income for Hispanics was more than $16,000 less. Since 2000, white median income has decreased $12; for African Americans it has decreased $1,804, for Hispanics it has decreased $1,256, and for Asians it has decreased $1,030. Those are huge disparities that continue to lay bare the racial and ethnic inequality of America. There is no way around it.

Poverty follows a similar pattern. Since 2000, the number of people in poverty has increased by 5.7 million; the number of families in poverty has increased by 1.2 million, and the number of children in poverty has increased by 1.7 million. In 2007; 37.3 million people are suffering in poverty.

Almost 25 percent of African Americans and 22 percent of Hispanics lived in poverty in 2007. They do not want to be told the fundamentals of the economy are strong—or only have poverty addressed when a hurricane slams into poor and underrepresented communities and their faces, names, and stories become fodder for the 24-hour cable news channels. They want the American consciousness and political system to recognize their plight and put forth real policies to remedy this evil.

On health care, it's more of the same. Since 2000, the number of uninsured in America has increased by 7.3 million and those not covered equal 15.3 percent of the population. The percentages of Hispanics and African Americans without health care are well above the national average.

Nationally, the economy and the conditions for working people are worse since President Bush took office. Haven’t we learned that trickle-down economics does not work? We must revive our economy, take back our industries, and promote economic opportunity for all. Bush is definitely leaving us with a bang: In his last year; our economy is in a recession (even though the administration doesn’t want to admit it), families are poorer, people are losing their homes, energy costs are sky high and we continue to put billions and billions of dollars into the Iraq War—when we need strong investment here in the United States.

Be ready for the United States Census Bureau to release its 2008 data in August 2009. The data will continue to paint a very bleak picture: the poor will be poorer, the number of uninsured will be higher, and America will try to rebuild itself after eight years of economic terror. At that time, the progressive movement must be ready to reassure working-class families that the rescue—investments in our people, our common property and in the green energy that will power the fuure; economic policies that end the upward redistribution of wealth; the end of billions of dollars being sent to Iraq; and the empowerment of workers—is on its way.

Acts of Creative Destruction: Rebuilding America for the 21st Century

Sara Robinson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:42:31 -0400

This blog has been covering the shameful collapse of America's infrastructure on almost a weekly basis, so it should come as no surprise to even our most casual readers that the physical structures and systems that support our entire way of life are in serious trouble. We all know the litany: the levees of New Orleans, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, overtaxed air traffic systems, construction cranes coming down all over, thousands of other structures quivering on their last legs. It's a slow-motion disaster-in-the-making.

And we all know the reason, too. All this stuff takes constant inspection and oversight, along with regular upgrades and maintenance. But for the last 30 years, conservative governments have resolutely cut budgets and driven out the experts whose job it was to keep the country's public works in good working order. They did it on purpose, to prove their ideological argument that putting infrastructure in the hands of government was always a bad idea. And they were also quietly licking their chops, waiting for the day that the people's capital—the stuff built up and bequeathed to us by so many generations of Americans before us—could be declared salvage, and sold off to their cronies for the price of scrap in one last privatizing fit.

Even so: we may actually look back in a decade and realize that the conservatives did us a huge favor. It's an article of Shock Doctrine thinking that every act of destruction makes way for an act of creation (or, at least, conservative perversion). In this case, the conservatives set the destruction process in motion long ago; but it seems pretty clear that they never expected there would be an Obama Moment—a moment of national renewal in which progressives would be able to seize the process and launch some bold, creative acts of our own.

It's not an overstatement to say that we may never have a creative opportunity like this one again. Even as our cities are crumbling around us, we're also finding ourselves in deep trouble on the energy front. Dwindling supplies and increasing demand are working their free-market magic, shrinking our household budgets and destabilizing our oil-based economy. Call it climate change or peak oil or simply the fall of the petrodollar, but there's a growing awareness that there's something deeply amiss -- and completely unsustainable -- about the entire system by which America extracts and consumes energy. And the more forward-thinking among us also realize now that solving this problem is going to require us to dramatically re-order our economy, invest in and invent new technologies, and completely re-think the way we build cities.

Much of our current failing infrastructure was built between the early 1930s and the mid-1960s—an era of vast public works projects that dammed rivers, raised skyscrapers, and laced the nation with interstate highways. The things our parents and grandparents built and the policy choices they made expressed the cultural values, economic and social priorities, and new technologies that dominated their era. Cheap energy allowed them to replace the streetcars and railroads—considered urban wonders by their own grandparents—with the speed and convenience of cars, trucks, and airplanes. It fueled the construction of big single-family houses and vast freeway networks, which in turn encouraged suburban sprawl. In an era when people believed that humans were put on earth to dominate and tame nature, and defined "quality of life" by the quantity of goods consumed, the suggestion that any of this might be permanently damaging the earth—or that it might cause problems down the road that would seriously threaten human existence—was simply absurd.

Fast forward 60 years, and we're now in a very different place. It's all too clear that our grandparents' technologies, economic priorities and ideas about what comprises a satisfying way of life are creating serious, planet-wide ecological trouble. These days, we realize that we live on a finite planet, and that we're finally bumping up against its limits. In particular, we don't have the vast reserves of cheap energy that will allow us to sustain the all the power-hungry systems our ancestors bequeathed to us. Those sprawling post-war cities made perfect sense in their time; but increasingly, they don't make sense in ours. But because all this stuff is already built—at a tremendous cost in money and material—it's also daunting to consider just how much of it will have to be rebuilt, refitted, or simply scrapped and replaced (or not) in order adapt to the new realities.

It would be much harder to justify a broad-scale rebuilding effort if everything was still working as it should. But since the conservatives have already done us the favor of letting it all fall apart, we've got a great opportunity to launch the same kind of national overhaul that we saw in the FDR years. This time, though, we have the opportunity to do rebuild the country our own way—a way that expresses 21st-century values, technologies, and economic priorities.

It's not enough to merely restore what's already there. We need to take an entirely fresh look at our assumptions about how cities and towns should be built, and put sustainability at the core of all our planning decisions. We might decide to reclaim what our 19th century ancestors knew about building pedestrian-friendly cities, where families lived above shops on lively neighborhood streets; and cozy small towns where everyone lived just a few blocks from Main Street. We might follow the example of Europe, which has closed most of its historic old downtowns to traffic, increased density, and connected its cities with fast electric trains. (The average European maintains a comfortable middle-class lifestyle with an ecological footprint that's less than half that of the average North American.) And we might rewrite our building and planning codes to encourage the use of green technology, and to reflect the new understandings about sustainable living that our urban planners have been refining over the past 40 years.

(We might also consider the parable of Greenberg, Kan.—the 1,400-person prairie hamlet that was flattened by a tornado in May 2007. Rather than simply rebuild, they invited in the sustainability experts, and decided to use their insurance money to reconstruct Greenberg as "the greenest town in America." Now that's what I'm talking about.)

There's a lot of this already happening at the local and regional level, as cities invest in LEED-certified public buildings, carve out bike trails, contain sprawl and preserve valuable agricultural land, and expand electric rail networks as they upgrade existing streets and bridges. And, for the most part, it will continue to happen just this way—one bridge, one solar or wind farm, and one rail line at a time.

But there's also much a new Obama administration can do at the federal level to greatly accelerate this process—and some initiatives that are simply too big to happen unless the federal government steps in and sets the direction. For example, while we're making solid progress toward carbon-free cars, nobody at the moment has the slightest clue about making a carbon-free airplane. However, much of the world already runs on high-speed electric trains. The technology already exists. And the U.S. is already criss-crossed with enough old railroad right-of-ways that we could create an all-electric semi-high-speed (100-120 mph) national rail network by 2015—for a price tag that's less than we spend in three months in Iraq.

Ultimately, such a network could take most of the truck freight off the interstates, greatly reducing the amount of carbon generated by transportation. The system could also be a competitive option for many air passengers who now take shuttle flights under 1,500 miles, reducing congestion and carbon output in our air traffic system as well. And electric trains can be powered by many different kinds of carbon-free sources, including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, or nuclear.

This idea was first proposed by Alan Bates at The Oil Drum. I heartily recommend his article, which explores the electric train idea in great economic and technical detail. But my larger point is this: There are plenty of good ideas like this out there. And right now, in the Obama Moment, we have an unprecedented opportunity to seek out the best of them, and start turning them into our children's reality.

Rick Perlstein notes that the Obama Moment will be a short one, and progressives will need to move quickly to get as much done as possible before it closes. But, as we saw in the FDR years, infrastructure renewal moves at a somewhat different pace—and has a sweet way of entrenching itself in a way that makes it very hard to stop the momentum once it gets started. Over the short term, the important goals are:

Restore public confidence in the government's ability to undertake large national infrastructure projects, and re-assert its right to set goals and policies to ensure those projects proceed smoothly.

Define the overarching standards for a reconstructed America. This will include federal review of the building and planning codes now in use, and probably the writing of new mandates that set out 21st-century standards and priorities for energy use, urban and transportation planning, and environmental design. Once these are put into law and accepted into general use, they'll be very hard to change.

Commit funding for a massive 10- or 20-year program that will upgrade or replace failing components of America's infrastructure. The country is broke (as it was in FDR's day); but this kind of spending needs to be seen as the long-term investment in our economic future that it is.

Restore a fair, honest, broad-based system of public contracting that will put large numbers of Americans to work on these new projects. (And write the new rules in a way that ensures that the firms doing the most innovative work don't have to compete with Halliburton and Lockheed for the lion's share of the funding.) Once you've got a healthy, competitive construction industry that knows how to build sustainable projects—and is relying on the government to keep it in business—you've got a political constituency that will fight to ensure that the rebuilding will continue for the next several decades, regardless of who's in power.

Once again, the Roosevelt years offer a guideline for what's possible, and how we might get this done. The conservatives, for their own reasons, have cleared the deck for us to start over. It's up to us to seize the moment, and get it done.

Undoing A Failed Legacy on Public Investment

Bill Scher — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:23:19 -0400

Collapsing Bridges, Sinking Levees. It’s (Past) Time to Invest

Eric Lotke — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:47:02 -0400

Last year on August 1, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during rush hour. Thirteen people died and more than 100 were wounded. A school bus carrying 52 children teetered on the brink but did not fall.

This bridge is not alone. Our nation’s infrastructure is deteriorating, dying of old age and neglect.

Making Sense Alert:
Invest in America Now
How to talk about the need
for investment in our
common assets in tough
economic times.

Bridges and roads. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that nearly 25 percent of bridges in the U.S.—over 152,000 bridges—are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” Heavier vehicles, like school buses and delivery trucks, are forced to take lengthy detours for safer bridges. Nearly one in four miles of urban interstate is in “poor” or “mediocre” condition.

Levees and waterways. Earlier this year, thousands of homes and millions of acres of crops were destroyed after heavy rains overwhelmed obsolete levees along the Mississippi River. In 2007, the American Society of Civil Engineers found more than 150 levees to be at high risk of failing due to poor maintenance. Over a quarter of the dams overseen by the Corps of Engineers have exceeded the lifespan for which they were designed and need major repairs to ensure their safety.

Water and steam. A steam pipe explosion in Manhattan last year launched a tow truck 12 feet in the air, killing one person and injuring dozens more. The blast opened a 40-foot-diameter crater and spread toxic asbestos, closing off 40 square blocks for five days. Almost every state—from California, Hawaii, and New York to Alaska and North Carolina—has reported record breakdowns in water infrastructure. In the words of one expert, “an epidemic of breaking pipes is causing unprecedented havoc.”

These are just illustrations of the deadly danger of letting our infrastructure go unmaintained. America’s electric power grid, dams, water treatment plants, airports, and railways are all in dire need of repairs and improvements.

The solution is obvious. Repair and rebuild. Rebuilding our infrastructure provides jobs—good jobs that can never be outsourced—and an economic shot in the arm that we desperately need. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that every $1 billion in federal highway investment creates 47,500 new jobs and generates more than $2 billion in economic activity.

The “greatest generation” built the Interstate Highway System and laid the groundwork for decades of economic expansion. Now it’s our turn to rebuild the highways and add high-speed rail to boot. We’ll be faster, safer and more efficient. Yes, it will cost money, and yes, we’re running deficits. But this is no time to run scared. These are long-term investments and they will pay off over time.

Don’t fall for the “pay as you go” trap or fear the “tax and spend” label. Real people are smarter than that. A new poll by Time Magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation finds 83 percent of the public supports “increasing government spending on things like public works projects to help create jobs.” Support is at 83 percent among the baby-boom generation who built the interstates, and a surprising 90 percent among the young generation Y who are watching them fall apart.

Let’s invest now to turn the economy around.

Obama & Telecom Immunity: The Importance of Pushing

Bill Scher — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:34:18 -0400

Yesterday, Isaiah urged Sen. Barack Obama to take the lead in fighting immunity for telecom companies that may have helped the Bush administration break surveillance laws.

I do not have high expectations.

It appears quite clear to me, from Obama's recent statement on the new surveillance bill, that he is not interested in letting this bill become a flashpoint of disagreement between himself and his presidential rival Sen. John McCain. So he is expressing reluctant support of the overall bill, he will likely vote for an amendment stripping telecom immunity, the amendment will likely fail, and the overall bill will become law.

It will be a disappointing outcome. But there are worthwhile lessons to take, as progressives prepare for a possible Obama presidency.

It's a reminder that Obama is a politician. Not in either a negative or positive sense. It's just a plain fact.

Which means that we cannot sit back and assume he, or anyone else that may become President, will simply do what we like all the time. We will always have to push.

On telecom immunity, prominent liberal bloggers joined civil libertarian organizations and pushed their hearts out. But the hard fact remains that the push did not succeed in turning intense opposition into broad opposition.

No one in the netroots deserves blame for that. It was extremely difficult to draw attention to an abuse of power issue, when most voters see economic issues more directly impacting their lives. (And the traditional media's dismissal of the telecom immunity issue didn't help.)

In turn, Obama and other Democrats don't have evidence that elevating this issue -- potentially crowding out differences on the economy, gas prices and Iraq -- is something that enough people want to make it politically worthwhile.

Is it reason to be disappointed? Yes. Is it reason to feel that those politicians cannot be presumed to always act on progressive principles? Yes.

But it's not a reason to believe grassroots voices won't be heard or can't have a major impact.

Obama -- along with former rivals John Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton -- were successfully pushed to adopt bolder positions on health care and global warming than Democratic politicians in the recent past. Why? Because progressives pushed, and pushed well.

When we push well, and show that there is broader public support for ideas too bold for narrow-minded Beltway elites to accept, that's when we move our nation forward.

And there is, and will be, a need to keep pushing.

For example, while Obama is calling for greater public investment in infrastructure, his proposal of $60 billion in infrastructure investment over 10 years pales in comparison to the challenge we face. My colleague Eric Lotke recently noted that our infrastructure needs $1.6 trillion to get up to snuff. Robert Borosage lamented that Obama's specific proposal "won't build many bridges, much less seed modern transit."

Obama calls for more in the area of clean energy and energy-efficiency: $150 billion over 10 years. But the Apollo Alliance reports says we need twice that amount to rapidly transition to a clean energy economy a decade from now.

There are five months left to build a crystal clear mandate that will set the table for progressive change no matter who gets elected. It's indisputable that the desire to change from eight years of failed conservatism is strong across America. But there is still more work to do to define what real change looks like.

So if there anything to take from Obama's telecom immunity move, it's that the need to push the parameters of acceptable debate is as critical and urgent as ever.

Orders of Magnitude

Eric Lotke — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:52:57 -0400

I had the privilege Tuesday morning of attending a hearing by Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, on the issue of America’s decaying infrastructure. It was an important hearing and everyone said the right things.

If that sounds encouraging, keep the good mood for a moment. Soon you’ll get to the “but.”

The people at the hearing all understood the problem. America is falling apart. Representatives and experts talked about our congested highways and collapsing bridges. They talked about bursting steam pipes and overflowing sewerage. They cited the American Society of Architects and Engineers’ conclusion that $1.6 trillion is needed to bring the nation's infrastructure to “good” condition. That’s just “good,” not excellent. They noted that our competitors in Asia spend five times as much on infrastructure as the U.S. as a percent of gross domestic product.

Most speakers credited historical America with great achievements – transcontinental railways, the interstate highway system, the Erie Canal – and they recognized the role that government played in those accomplishments. Our U.S. government recognized the need, provided the funding and organized the construction.

The ranking Republican, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., recognized needs in excess of a trillion dollars. He went out of his way to praise conservative president Dwight Eisenhower, who proposed the interstate highway system in 1954 – conceiving a half-trillion dollar project at a time when the entire federal budget was $78 billion. He lamented that today’s conservatives aren’t equal to a challenge of that magnitude.

Not only did they see the magnitude of the problem, they spoke creatively about solutions. Proposals on the table ranged from public-private infrastructure banks to a National Development Infrastructure Corporation. Proposals were diverse and well-constructed.

Now the “but.” Having recognized the scale of the problem, the solutions barely nibbled around the edges. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a main mover, has championed a bill that proposes $9 billion over three years, or $3 billion per year. The main bill on the Senate side proposes $60 billion over 10 years, or $6 billion per year.

It’s good news to ante up several billion a year towards this serious problem, but get real. The same speakers outlined a $1.6 trillion problem. The solutions are off by orders of magnitude. Where’s the rest of the money going to come from? That’s the $1.59 trillion dollar question.

Our leaders are afraid of deficits. They are afraid of taxes, and under the thrall of paying as they go.

They need to let that go before we can solve these problems. These are long-term investments. They require long-term financing and long-term vision.

Real people pay as they go for household expenses like food and clothing. They borrow for investments like houses, cars and college. Responsible people do it, and so can responsible government. Smart investments pay back over time.

Tuesday's hearing provided an important service by outlining the problem and starting to look for solutions. But it’s only a first step. More is needed. By the speakers' own estimates, $1.59 trillion more steps are needed.

McCain's Faulty Pork Radar

Bill Scher — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:17:20 -0400

The Huffington Post reported last night on Sen. John McCain's inaccurate claim that he supported "every" investigation into the response to Hurricane Katrina:

Appearing at a press conference in Louisiana on Wednesday, McCain claimed that he had supported "every investigation" into the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina, when, in fact, he had twice voted against creating a commission to inspect the tragedy.

The remark immediately bounced around political circles and websites. After all it was just a few months ago when McCain defended those very votes on the back of his campaign bus, casting them as part of a broader campaign against wasteful spending.

"I'm proud of my support of American citizens regarding the taxpayers," the Senator said in April. "I will not vote for projects and programs and bills that are laden with pork-barrel projects that waste taxpayers' dollars."

McCain's excuse for opposing that investigation is just as notable as the opposition.

McCain has portrayed himself as the ultimate pork-buster, bravely rooting out wasteful spending on bloated government. In fact, it is his main plank in his economic strategy. From his Tuesday night speech:

I take America's economic security as seriously as I do her physical security. For eight years the federal government has been on a spending spree that added trillions to the national debt. It spends more and more of your money on programs that have failed again and again to keep up with the changes confronting American families.

Extravagant spending on things that are not the business of government indebts us to other nations; fuels inflation; raises interest rates; and encourages irresponsibility. I have opposed wasteful spending by both parties and the Bush administration.

It's a compelling tautology. Wasteful spending should be stopped because it is wasteful.

But as I noted when shredding the annual "Pig Book" from inaccurately named Citizens Against Government Waste, a lot of folks throw around the "pork" label without bothering to assess if the targeted spending is actually wasteful.

And by characterizing an independent Katrina investigation (as well as $28 billion in relief for victims) as "pork-barrel projects that waste taxpayers' dollars," only shows poor judgment in distinguishing between wasteful spending and worthy investment.

That is the true test for politicians. Anyone can rail against pork. Anyone can claim to oppose wasteful spending.

But can the politician accurately identify where the wasteful spending is?

Making Sense of the Rising Cost of College

Alex Carter — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:45:39 -0400

As college students celebrate graduation this May, their joy is combined with the harsh reality they face post-graduation--many of these students will graduate with unmanageable levels of loan debt that they can not afford basic necessities. Conservatives will tell you they are dedicated to expanding educational opportunities and in the same breath let the banking and student loan industry know, “I have all of you in my two trusted hands.”

The basics are clear:

- When Bush took office in January 2001, the cost of tuition at a public four year institution was $3,501. The cost of tuition in 2006-07 was $5,685 —an increase of 39%; even at the same time median household income has decreased 2% .
- The social safety nets are failing under Bush’s watch: over 400,000 qualified high school graduates can not attend college each year because of its burdensome cost, the Pell Grant only covers 33% of a student’s annual college costs (in 1975, the Pell Grant covered 84%) , and he stripped over $12 billion from the federal student loan program to fund his tax cuts for the wealthy.

The connections are clear as well; President Bush and conservatives did everything to fatten the pockets of the bank and loan industry while ignoring the plight of qualified high school graduates obtaining a college education. Conservatives did nothing to help promote college affordability and accessibility for years. Pell Grants remained at the same level, affordability was not addressed, and state-tuition levels continued to skyrocket. Bush’s yearly budgets contained massive cuts in higher education funding and favorable policies to the $85 billion private student loan industry.

However, Bush and conservatives made sure the bank and loan industry was taken care of. The private student loan industry’s cozy relationship with Republicans and their “Raid on Student Aid” was of no coincidence. During the tenure of former Chairman of the Committee on Education and Workforce Rep. Job Boehner (R-OH) told the Consumer Bankers Association,

“Relax. Stay calm…at the end of the day, I believe you’ll be at least satisfied, or even perhaps happy….
Know that I have all of you in my two trusted hands.”

It just so happened, the student loan industry contributed over $290,000 to Boehner’s PAC and the private student loan goliath Sallie Mae was the number one contributor to his campaign in the 2003-04 election cycle.

We must continue to connect the dots; Bush and conservatives in Congress do not care about college accessibility and affordability; however, they place the banking and loan industry in their “two trusted hands.”

For more about the college aid issue, click here (www.ourfuture.org/makingsense2008)

Let's Bank On Rebuilding America

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:48:40 -0400

Instead of a silly argument over a "gas tax holiday," we desperately need a serious discussion about the nation's infrastructure. And there is a good legislative proposal that could be the basis for that discussion.

There are bills in the House (HR 3401) and the Senate (S 1926) that would create a national infrastructure bank. It could be one way to bring some common sense to the task of rebuilding America's roads, bridges, sewers and public buildings. The creation of this bank should be part of the effort progressives are making in Congress to enact a second stimulus bill this month.

Such a bank would allow the federal government to finance these projects in the same way that states do: by issuing long-term, tax-exempt bonds or by making loan guarantees.

Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said they support the idea of an infrastructure bank, although it rarely comes up in their campaign speeches. And that's a shame, because they both need to spend their time reinforcing an emerging national mandate for repairing and improving our crumbling foundations.

Just last month, the blog Infrastructure Watch notes, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the nation's total water infrastructure needs would cost between $485 billion to $1.2 trillion. However, funding for the largest federal drinking water and wastewater infrastructure programs have been flat or declining.

Also, the Congressional Budget Office told Congress last year that the Highway Trust Fund, which is made up largely of the revenue from the gasoline tax, will run out of money in 2009. Spending is outpacing money flowing into the fund. (High gasoline prices, in fact, worsens that problem. When high prices force cutbacks in driving, less money flows into the fund; the federal gasoline tax is a per-gallon tax; it does not increase proportionately to the cost of a gallon of gasoline.) One key reason for the exhaustion of the fund is that prices for materials such as asphalt and concrete are exceeding the general rate of inflation.

In March, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, David G. Mongan, reminded the House Banking Committee that in 2005 the organization gave a grade of "D" to the state of the nation's infrastructure and said that an investment of $1.6 trillion by 2010 would be needed to bring the fix these public resources. At the time, that bad grade got a fair amount of attention. Since then:

Nothing approaching that level of investment has been made. Indeed, little has changed in the three years since we handed out that dismal grade, and establishing a longterm plan to finance the development and maintenance of our infrastructure remains a pressing national priority.

This nation continues to under-invest in infrastructure at the national level. The total of all federal spending for infrastructure as a share of all federal spending has steadily declined over the last 30 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

One of the more shameful examples of what Robert Kuttner adroitly calls "the squandering of America" is the failure of America to take care of its basic public assets, especially after the Bush administration inherited a government with a budget surplus that gave it the leeway to tackle that challenge intelligently. (Colleague Bill Scher has linked to some NBC News reports on how we're literally falling apart and is asking why the media, including NBC, isn't doing more to press this into the national debate.) Under the guise of controlling spending, the administration has shifted an increasing share of the national burden to state and local governments—where the same conservatives who say the federal government shouldn't tax to pay for these needs make the same argument at the state and local level—or encouraged turning public assets into private profit centers.

Now that the country is moving through a recession, there is an even more critical need to target government resources on projects that will produce jobs in the short run and leave the nation in the long run with the clean water, transportation, schools and other public facilities that a nation needs to be healthy and economically vibrant. As Congress considers a second economic stimulus package for short-term relief this month, it should authorize the creation of that infrastructure bank. Then let's have a serious debate about how to fund it and how to use it when the next president takes office.

A Patriotic Day

Bill Scher — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:13:52 -0400

Today is Tax Day, the deadline for filing our tax returns. It is fundamentally a patriotic day, the day where we citizens fund our own government. We are no longer ruled by monarchs who govern by the power of their own wealth. With taxation, we have representation. We fought a revolution about that.

It is our money, and it is our government. Part of our patriotic duty is to demand that our tax dollars are invested wisely by our government. How's that been going?

In short, terribly. Conservatives rammed through reckless tax cuts primarily to those earning more than $200,000 a year. More than $500 billion has been wasted on the occupation of Iraq, with the eventual bill expected to hit $3 trillion. Meanwhile public investment in our nation's health, energy, education and infrastructure has been starved.

It's time to restore tax fairness and responsibility. As we slog through a recession and rising costs, some temporary reduction in taxes for middle-class families is in order. But that won't get medical, energy and education costs down for good.

To truly tackle the rising costs eating away at the middle-class, we need to pool our resources, make the up-front investments that pay off in the long-run, and quit blowing money on proven failures.

We need to invest in health care for all, clean domestic energy and energy-efficiency, and accessible education. We need to end the foreign policy quagmires jacking up energy prices, scrap a health care system designed for drug and insurance company CEOs, and stop saddling our kids with massive debt to the student loan companies.

Since it is Tax Day, you can expect another round of tax demagoguery from conservatives -- as if the mere existence of taxes is the cause of the recession, and conservatives never got their way for the past seven years.

For example, Sen. John McCain's latest attempt to address the economy fully embraces the Bush tax cuts he originally scorned, offers a fat tax cut for business owners, while throwing in a few extra scraps for the masses -- like a summer-long repeal of the 18-cent gas tax, which amounts to a sliver of the $2.00 a gallon gas rise in the Bush Era. But no proposals to invest in our weakening foundation, so all Americans can flourish in the global economy.

Washington conservatives push tax cuts regardless of the economic climate, because they are not interested in having an economy that works for all. They are interested in a shrunken government that works for the elite few.

The progressive vision is for a public tax system combined with public investment strategy that raises revenue fairly and invests our resources wisely.

It's our money. We decide what to do with it. If we didn't like how conservatives squandered our resources over the last seven years, we can make a change.

And we can thank taxation with representation for that.