It’s no secret that America’s infrastructure is in dire need of repairs. Earlier this year, America received her infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ and received a repulsive D+. The ASCE guesstimates the US would need to spend $4.5 trillion by 2025 on infrastructure.
Here’s the breakdown of the report card:
- Aviation: D
- Bridges: C+
- Dams: D
- Drinking Water: D
- Energy: D+
- Hazardous Waste: D+
- Inland Waterways: D
- Levees: D
- Parks and Recreation: D+
- Ports: C+
- Rail: B
- Roads: D
- Schools: D
- Solid Waste: C+
- Transit: D-
- Wastewater: D+
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With that being said, I’ve spent the entire weekend inspecting America’s infrastructure at the Port of Baltimore.
At some locations, I was given special access to a behind the scenes view of America’s crumbling infrastructure that the public is not allowed to see. The reasons you’re left out of the know is because it destroys the mainstream narrative that everything is awesome.
Even Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group says, “the US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure”.
In the Sunday Edition, Alastair Williamson is on site at a marine terminal in the Port of Baltimore. He provides an interesting view of America’s deteriorating infrastructure blended with the current shape of the US economy.
In this video, Alastair is given special access to behind the scenes of America’s crumbling infrastructure. This view is rarely seen by the mainstream public. Enjoy!
A D for drinking water here in w Texas must be being graded on a curve. Yuck-o man, it’s impossible to drink from Lubbock to Midland. A weekly chore is lugging the 5 gal containers down to the WaterMill and filling them up for us and our pets.
We are also subjected to don’t drink this crap(that we charge you about $75/month) every few months as small fuckup or another has rendered it undrinkable.
When I lived in Golden CO, I had a small in line filter right under my sink and that water was delicious.
How can we be in this condition after eight years of Obama’s shovel ready projects that fixed everything?
Typical right wing,racist Republican sarcastic reaction Anon.
You know Mr Obama did his best but the Republicans conspired to keep our future Mt Rushmore President from fulfilling his promises so he just changed course from domestic accomplishments to international accomplishments such as Libya,Ukraine and Syria.
Think your boy Trump will be as good?
Oh Tampa, gag me with your Idol worship of Obozo, the one called B. Hussein Barry Soetero.
He already has his place at Mt. Rushmore. It is the scrabble at the foot of the mountain. That resembles the damage he did to this country and the mess he left for President Trump, a real man, to clean up. So take your koolaid somewhere else and drink to your hearts’ content. I hope he enjoys looking at that because that is as good as it is gonna get.
Polish Trump’s shoes while you’re down there slobbing his knob, asshole. You haven’t been here long enough to be able to tell when somebody is joking. You need to lurk until you know who is who here. This ain’t ZH with two thousand regulars commenting mindlessly on 100+ “articles” a day. That’s where you belong, though.
thanks ed–based on the # of down votes that comment received,i got the troll of the day award–
admin,where’s my participation trophy?
Sarcasm seems to be lost on some people.
I know that the major road near my house that DIDN’T need repaving was repaved while countless other smaller side roads have huge potholes and cracking pavement. But then those huge orange signs promoting Obama-worship and his “shovel-ready” project weren’t going to be seen on the smaller roads. Indeed, government succeed at promoting more government worship as always.
Murica!!! Fuck yeah!!!
I highly doubt more than 10% of the entire worlds population likes, believes or trusts their own governments.
You would LOSE that bet. If 90% actually felt that way, we wouldn’t be this fucked up as a planet. Sadly way more than half defer ALL THE TIME to the criminals that infest their federal, state/provincial, and local governments. And if those numbers start to fall, the bastards simply start/provoke a war and the sheeple come running and begging for more losses of freedom and liberty like the good little government school graduates they nearly all are.
Yet the same people who are supposed to invest in infrastructure have the money to install cameras. On another note if the government would have the young male soldiers work here in America than sending them overseas, that would be beneficial, but of course that isn’t going to happen.
I’ll be the first to say the country is going to shit, but I’m always suspicious of report cards like this from the ASCE. Who benefits the most if we increase spending to infrastructure? Any conflict of interest for the ASCE?
I would say that if you have been anywhere near “observant” about even what is right before your eyes, much less those things you can’t readily see or don’t have easy access to, you would know things are pretty dicey.
Bridges, roads, highways, dams, drainage, utilities were built a long time ago, moving east to west, and aging accordingly. Power, water, sewage, transpo, etc., have seen increased heavy usage and no maintenance to speak of for decades and you think the ASCE is issuing self-promoting reports? Get real.
Of course, construction, civil engineering, etc. will benefit but those are the folks who do the work, will create the jobs and git’er done! So what?
You must be one of those people who refuses to take your car in for service because you don’t want the shop to make a buck off you. You would rather have a break down on the road/freeway than a reliable mode of transportation. Well, our infrastructure has been ignored for too long by self-serving politicians who collect taxes and waste them on “feel-good” projects, or simple graft and corruption.
You’re right, it’s stupid of me to be skeptical of a group that stands to benefit hugely from their recommendations. That’s why I completely and unironically support Al Gore’s call for $15 trillion in taxes to fix global warming, which is apparently 100% real.
Obviously things are going to shit; in my first sentence I acknowledged as much. I was questioning whether they were inflating their case out of self-interest. A “D” for aviation? How many incidents do we have each year? A “D+” for parks and recs? Are their kids being impaled on playground sets or being eaten by alligators?
Or should I just shut the hell up and pay whatever the experts tell me to pay?
Only things above a C+ is Warren Buffets rails, the Mob’s garbage (solid waste), and bridges so the sheeple can get to work get a payday to pay their taxes…..everything else is good for the sheeple and being ignored…..water, who gives a damn about water, let them eat cake…..
I have an idea for a tax cut/infrastructure plan.What do you guys think of it?
During the Prez campaign we heard many x about the $3t that is held offshore & not brought back to the US by evil corps because of high corporate taxes.
I read somewhere(Stockman I believe,not sure)that over half is actually invested back here but is offshore on paper.Let’s say it is “just” $1t that is offshore/not invested here.
What if we temporarily,1-3 years,cut the corp tax to 0% for all offshore $ that is repatriated IF the $ is passed thru in dividends.
We would also cut taxes on dividends to 0% if they are invested in state/local infrastructure bonds.
To keep state/local govts honest,these bonds would only be allowable for certain uses such as roads,bridges,sewer,water,etc-no make work projects such as sidewalks or parks.
They would also have to be on projects that the bondholder could repossess and charge people to use so as to keep politicians honest.
If Tampa built a giant waste water treatment system in anticipation of growth that did not materialize and could not pay the bond costs because of the political hurt from raising rates,the bondholders could take over the system and raise rates.
Some of you will reject this immediately because of philosophical reasons.I have no argument with that except that something is going to get passed at some point-why not make it as simple and market based as possible?
Yes, the point is that when politicians provoke or create wars, there is massive penalties. Most people can see the evidence of slaughters and maimings and woundings and the heart breaks of loved ones and the waste of materials and property and labor. But one of the forgotten penalties is the legacy of losses imposed on the survivors well into the future. The litany of infrastructure collapse or ruin is indeed the penalty for adventures into wars such as The American Civil War, Spanish American War, WW I, WW II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Grenada, Somalia, Iraq I & II, Afghanistan et.al. And so we see the penalty for having political government; it is a total disaster; it is a tyranny. We would be better off to try organizational government based on voluntary contracts. There is no factual evidence that constitution and law apply to you just because you are physically present in some geographical location such as Kentucky. Read Lysander Spooner’s No Treason No. 6, The Constitution of No Authority. View some of The No State Project on YouTube per Marc Stevens. Spend some time with The Zero Aggression Project by Perry Willis and Jim Babka. Finally, read Away From Freedom by Vervon Orval Watts to see an excellent rebuttal of all the fallacious claims of commie/socialism that has been adopted by Amerikan politicians, especially the Demoncrats and their sycophantic, “snow flake,” economics ignorant cadre of hate speakers. Oh, the unintended consequences of using and sanctioning the politicians to use violence, aggression, force.
As a guy who designs and maintains infrastructure for a living I can testify that the ASCE report is pretty accurate. However, the problem isn’t that the government is not spending money on infrastructure, but they are spending it on the wrong type.
You want to see some As and Bs on ASCE’s report card, then they should have included:
– Bike lanes
– Light rail
– New City Halls
– Sports Arenas
This is where your tax money is going. In fact, the towns I work and live in use street maintenance money to fund flower baskets on the downtown streets. Screw the potholes, we need more lipstick on the pig.
Politicians only want to spend money on projects where they can attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony without a bunch of protestors bitching that they lost their house due to the project. That’s why bike lanes and light rail are so popular now. No houses need to be condemned. You just take traffic lanes used by suburbanites and replace them with rails or lanes for bikes. Presto, you have a ribbon to cut and none of your voters are pissed off.
@Trapped, Yeah, I used to live outside Beaverton, just west of “Stump Town”/Portlandia and I remember see those hanging flower baskets there and in Tualatin and then I’d see this fella driving a little watering truck to feed water up to each pot of flowers and then I thought all the poor taxpayers who were looted to pay for this make-work position and all the wasted taxes for the whole gd project. This is just another example of the utter corruption of political government; it is pure violence; it is aggression. The public workers are the participants in the grand criminal empire.
Stunning footage? I used my time to look at those lame ass videos. Nothing, but some puker, blah, blah, blah. WFT, I want my money back.
The kid is essentially right when he says you don’t need infrastructure if there is NO need for it. Corporations are not coming back if you build the infrastructure. They will have to be forced back, either through decree or import goods taxation. We all know that’s not gonna happen. That’s why there should be no corporate donations allowed to government officials EVER!! Everyone gets one vote… that’s it!! No government handouts to corporations either. You can’t make it? Too bad!
Either way the “system” is going to fail….there’s no stopping it
So let ‘er rip!
Political government is violence as Tolstoy wrote in The Law of Love and The Law of Violence. The use of aggression, force or violence is evil; it is just what Satan desires. Nations that have followed political violence, commie/socialism, have been the source of the massive slaughters of wars and the horrible economic catastrophes of recessions and The Great Depression accompanied by massive human misery. We don’t need political government. It is time to begin a shift to organizational government based on voluntary contracts.
As for voting, I don’t see how anyone has the right to take a vote to sanction the politicians to use lethal force against you to control your person and property. I don’t see that as a right, I see it as a crime.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. ~ Herman Goering
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” — Benjamin Franklin
“The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” ~ H.L. Mencken
Yes, the slop-at-the-trough, suck-at-the-golden-teat welfare state, run by “statists,” will fail and must fail as it is based on the immorality of loot A to satisfy B.
Obunghole promised infrastructure repair too and none got done. Here’s the biggest obstacle:
https://www.garynorth.com/public/16743.cfm
Yes, way too much government intervention in our lives. And then the news is full of all the harm that government has perpetrated; it give one pause for thought and that maybe we just don’t need political government which is based on violence/aggression and would be better off with organizational government based on voluntary contracts. I recall the disaster of the Teton Dam collapse in 1976 as it was filling for the first time. This was a Bureau Of Reclamation boondoggle; at least 11 people were killed and few hundred thousand livestock.
The media NEVER show up to cover a “ribbon-cutting” ceremony when a sewer pipe is properly maintained, a bridge is repaired, a sinkhole is prevented, a highway is expanded, etc. And that is pretty much all you need to know about why TRILLIONS are being STOLEN and yet nothing critical is being taken care of (while as “Trapped” stated above, plenty of unnecessary building is going on that gets lots of media attention).