Unbelievable http://www.minyanville.com/dailyfee...o/?camp=syndication&medium=portals&from=yahoo We are going back to the Stone Age. Literally. From NACO (National Association of Counties): Several counties across the country are going back to the Stone Age â turning asphalt roads back to gravel, or considering doing so â as rising costs outstrip their ability to maintain their pavements. Counties in Iowa, Michigan, California and South Dakota are among those that have decided either to stop maintaining a percentage of their asphalt roads or to pulverize some paved roads and downgrade them to gravel. Naturally, California is home to some of the hardest-hit counties. Sonoma County, for example, based on annual projected revenues can only afford to budget $5 million to maintain all the county's roads. But estimates project the cost of maintenance at 11 times that, or $55 million
The counties are making capital allocation decisions, and most county roads don't have enough traffic to justify asphalt. It must be rough being Chicken Little all the time.
up until Roman times debt jubilees were used to wipe-out debt. the reasoning was that debts tended to grow at compound interest and the economy grew at a linear fashion. Making it impossible to pay off aggregated debt . Today exponentially increasing technology that could elevate living standards for all, has been subordinated to a financial system that will regress us back in to the dark ages. paper claims on wealth has replaced real wealth as the drivers of western civilization.Since wealth is tangible things that increase the standard of living anything physically possible could be made financially possible.
Well, 40 years ago, the US Federal Gov't and States and Counties did not operate on a deficit basis with the exception of WWII and a few years afterwards. And 40 years ago there were alot more gravel roads than there are now. It's called not spending more money than you are taking in. Novel concept.
In Arizona, the EPA forced us to pave every cow-path or lose Fed highway funds. In the summer, we still fail their particulate standards because of dust-storms...next we'll have to pave the desert
I thought all those Trillions of dollars they have been printing were suppose to go to city jobs for infrastructure repairs etc etc etc......
you think it might have something to do with the price of oil? in parts of my state we have many miles of paved backwoods roads and very few people. where is the tax base to pay for new roads? up till now most of the road rebuilding in my state has been federal funds. that is ending since the feds are broke.