Anyone Got A Nickel to Help The Poor U.S. Fix Its Potholes?

August 10, 2015

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNews.com

Republicans won’t spend a nickel to improve our roads, make our bridges safe, or improve rail or other vital transportation systems. Literally, a nickel. Five cents.

The U.S. Senate shot down a proposal to do just that---raise the gas tax by five cents. Instead, to pay the cost of fixing the nation’s potholes, the Senate opted to sell oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the pool that’s supposed to keep the nation moving for at least six months in the event of a worldwide emergency. The House wouldn’t even go that far. They scampered off on their summer recess after extending the current underfunded road program for just three months.

The last time Congress raised the federal gas tax was 1993. If that increase had been tied to inflation, over the 23 years since, the gas tax would have risen to 65 cents more than it is today. To say it another way, we spend 65% less on our transportation system than we did in 1993.

But ideologically, the Republican congressional majority cannot bring itself to raise a tax, any tax, even one as tied to free market principles as the gas tax----a tax that says people who use the highways should pay for their upkeep, extension and improvement.

Those in Congress who like to claim they are guardians of free market principles are proving to be pretty stupid business people.

Real business people are using this time of historically low interest rates to expand their businesses and to bulk up with what amounts to nearly free money. Congress, on the other hand, facing decay across the board, not only to the transportation system, but to crumbling water and sewer lines and other vital infrastructure, can’t rouse itself from its ideological aversion to making government work right.

Meanwhile, when it comes to infrastructure improvements, the rest of the world is eating our lunch. Anyone who travels has to marvel at how forward looking so many other countries are compared with the U.S.

Bogota, Columbia is rebuilding itself to be one of the financial, industrial and technological centers of Latin America.

Khazar islands, under development in Azerbaijan, is a brand new city rising on landfill near Baku. When completed, Khazar is expected to house nearly a million people, and will be equipped with 150 schools, 50 hospitals and daycare centers, ubiquitous parks, shopping malls, cultural centers, universities and even a Formula 1 race track.

Similar city building projects are under way in Nigeria, South Korea, and elsewhere around the globe. New cities and ones being restored with modern transportation systems, high speed communications, commitments to solar, wind and other non-carbon producing energy sources, and with plenty of green space.

India is planning a $100 billion industrial corridor aimed at building a wide swath of industrial zones as a launching pad for new industries and massive new job-creating developments. One of the new cities that will rise along that corridor, according to the current plan, with be six times larger than Shanghai.

Even London, creaky old London, is well into work on a sleek new 73-mile extension of its Underground, a project which, by 2019, will tie in many currently unserved regions with the central city.

In the U.S., every year it’s a battle in Congress to pay for minimal improvements to Amtrak. Meanwhile, Japan’s maglev train recently set a new world record, traveling 374 miles an hour. There’s talk of building a maglev connection between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. If it happens it will be because the Japanese are paying most of the cost. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation. That’s right, suspended in air.

The Chinese have a maglev train, too. Fully operational, running on a route through Shanghai at about 260 miles an hour.

Airports? The new Mexico City airport will have a solar energy generating roof, an onsite plant that will collect, treat and recycle rainwater, and despite the enormous traffic the new airport will handle, 50 million people a year, gates will be within walking distance. The airport’s expected to be operating in 2020.

Aside from California’s controversial plan to build a new high speed train to link its north and south there’s no project of such scale or equal imagination anywhere in the U.S. (Except for the tens of billions being poured into things military).

The United States Congress cannot even bring itself to spend an extra nickel to fill our potholes. Not one of the 17 Republicans who would be President gave a hint of changing any of this during the Fox News TV debate. The hottest topics afterward were whether Donald Trump was mean to Megyn Kelly and how excited Republicans were that Carly Fiorina called Hillary Clinton a liar.

It makes you pine for George H.W. Bush who at least recognized that Presidents and other U.S. leaders need “that vision thing.” If our current crop can’t even see the problem there’s not much chance of their doing anything useful to solve it.

That’s my two cents worth.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)