Re: Rebuild Iraq? What about rebuilding America?
Wait a second. I drive down Route 95, and every major city has huge road projects. Baltimore, DC, NY, New Jersey. Of course there is the big dig in Boston, 40 years of Metro expansion in DC, and they are building like one school per month in Vegas and five a month in Florida just to keep up with the population changes. This country builds like mad. We have plenty of infrastructure. Is every dollar spent on the right infrastructure? There you might have an arguement.
Is every infrastructure dollar a federal dollar? Hardly. With low interest rates every municipality that can issue bonds is calling their high interest bonds and issuing new low interest bonds. Massachusetts, the king of liberal spending, is running a state surplus for god sakes. To extrapolate a levy failure and say that it is the surface of a much bigger problem is certainly not proven.
I'll tell you the biggest risk we took, and one that Bush will get no credit for. The closure of oil infrastructure could have put the country into a recession. Our pipelines, ports, refineries and terminals are not redundant, and have very little spare capacity. We dodged a huge bullet. We need a deep water port in the Panhandle of Florida. We need redundant pipelines from multiple entry points.
And, overlooked in all of this is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Bush made a commitment after 9/11 to fill the entrie capacity. Oddly enough, the storage was due to be completely full this August, the country has never before had more barrels of oil in reserve. We should double the capacity of that reserve, and set up similar programs for natural gas, and refined fuels. THAT is the infrastructure story we should be paying attention to. If OBL hit the Colonial Pipeline today, we would have a five year recession, and a lot more than one city would be in trouble...