Rebuilding our infrastructure

A house divided cannot stand. While Lincoln spoke of slavery, today it is a different sort of bondage that threatens to tear our nation asunder - blind allegiance to ideologies thoroughly at odds with our social contract and with the spirit of collective action as embodied in our time honored motto, “e pluribus Unum” (literally, from many one), is splitting America, eroding its democracy and with it our infrastructure, the very physical constructs that comprise a great nation.

America’s spending on infrastructure has declined over the past 40 years and is now just 2.4 percent of its GDP, far less than other developed nations. Europe spends 5 percent, for example, and China 9 percent. The American Society of Civil Engineers says that it will take $2.2 trillion over the next five years to keep levees from buckling, bridges from toppling and our schools from crumbling; for maintaining our roads, airports and rails; for cleaning our water and modernizing our electrical grid.

Yet nearly half of our political leadership pledge their loyalty not to the Constitution and greater good of the nation, but rather to their selfish ideals. They’d as soon have fields flood or forests burn, children starve or the sick suffer before they raise a nickel of taxes, which are lower than at any time in the last 60 years and are the lowest in the Western world.

Regardless, America simply must invest in its infrastructure. We can raise the necessary funds through a variety of sources, including direct user fees and energy taxes, bonds and in some cases public-private partnerships. In order to minimize politicization, we must devise a system that prioritizes projects using cost-benefit analyses and non-interested outside evaluators. These could be arbiters from other countries, or authorities from one state could evaluate projects in another state.

The federal government itself should do most of the work. The greatest nation on earth can surely hire all needed personnel — the designers, engineers and workers — to get the jobs done. These federally funded and operated projects will create wonderful job opportunities for our troops returning home and for the many unemployed across the land.

The preservation of America for ourselves and our posterity may be the one goal that can once again unite us all. Together, truly together, we can do anything.