Both the economy and employment would improve if....but.... "An Associated Press analysis of 607,380 bridges in the most recent federal National Bridge Inventory showed that 65,605 were classified as "structurally deficient" and 20,808 as "fracture critical." Of those, 7,795 were both â a combination of red flags that experts say indicate significant disrepair and similar risk of collapse." Build We Wonât JULY 3, 2014 You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes. And the appropriate policy response was simple, too: Fill that hole in demand. In particular, the aftermath of the bursting bubble was (and still is) a very good time to invest in infrastructure. In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer. But what actually happened was exactly the opposite: an unprecedented plunge in infrastructure spending. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, public expenditures on construction have fallen more than 20 percent since early 2008. In policy terms, this represents an almost surreally awful wrong turn; weâve managed to weaken the economy in the short run even as we undermine its prospects for the long run. Well played! And itâs about to get even worse. The federal highway trust fund, which pays for a large part of American road construction and maintenance, is almost exhausted. Unless Congress agrees to top up the fund somehow, road work all across the country will have to be scaled back just a few weeks from now. If this were to happen, it would quickly cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs, which might derail the employment recovery that finally seems to be gaining steam. And it would also reduce long-run economic potential. How did things go so wrong? As with so many of our problems, the answer is the combined effect of rigid ideology and scorched-earth political tactics. The highway fund crisis is just one example of a much broader problem. So, about the highway fund: Road spending is traditionally paid for viadedicated taxes on fuel. The federal trust fund, in particular, gets its money from the federal gasoline tax. In recent years, however, revenue from the gas tax has consistently fallen short of needs. Thatâs mainly because the tax rate, at 18.4 cents per gallon, hasnât changed since 1993, even as the overall level of prices has risen more than 60 percent........ ..............Itâs one thing to block green investment, or high-speed rail, or even school construction. Iâm for such things, but many on the right arenât. But everyone from progressive think tanks to the United States Chamber of Commerce thinks we need good roads. Yet the combination of anti-tax ideology and deficit hysteria (itself mostly whipped up in an attempt to bully President Obama into spending cuts) means that weâre letting our highways, and our future, erode away. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...r=rssnyt&emc=rss ***************************************** As I've said so many times now. The biggest problem with the USA today is the GOP and the ignorant, deluded, angry, short sighted, hysterical, paranoid right. The anti-progress gang. Seriously, what have they done for us lately? Anything at all ? And people blame Obama. What a joke.