America is Coming Apart at the Seams

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 9:00 AM on July 16, 2008.

A few weeks ago, for the fourth time in the past two years, I was driving in a major metropolitan area -- this time in New York City -- in a country with the world's largest economy, when I hit a massive divit in the roadway, maybe ten inches deep, that blew out my tire.

It was, of course, raining hard, as it tends to be when one gets a flat (I've long thought that Murphy was an optimist).

Last year, in the suburbs of DC -- the capitol of the country with the world's largest economy -- I hit a huge pothole, replaced my tire with the "doughnut" spare, and then blew that out in another Lake Michigan-sized pothole a few miles down the road. As the kids say: I shit you not.

New York, like so many of our urban centers, is falling apart around us -- a result of years of underinvestment in our infrastructure, which, in turn, is a result in large part of the successes of the New Right's anti-tax crusade, embraced as a bipartisan affair since the 1990s.

Last August, after that overpass in Minnesota collapsed, I wrote a piece titled, "Are the Dead From the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse Victims of Conservative Ideology?" (I submitted the title, "America, Crumbling," but my editor put the kibosh on it).

America's core infrastructure has been falling apart in very visible ways during the past few years. It's a predictable outcome of the rise of "backlash" conservatism; we've swallowed 30 years of small-government rhetoric, and it's led us to a point in which our infrastructure, once the pride of the developed world, is falling apart around us. We're reaping what we've sown.

We have a crumbling power grid and are falling behind the rest of the world in broadband infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) talks of "congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges" that are "constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation's prosperity and our quality of life." Every year the engineering society issues a report card grading 15 categories of America's once-premier infrastructure. In 2005, that "core" infrastructure collectively got a "D-," slightly worse than the "D" it received in 2000. Ironically, the nation's bridges received the highest score -- a "C" -- in 2005.

The accessways around New York City are like a depression-era mural -- hulking masses of creaky old iron patched with uneven steel plates or left unpatched altogether. The city's environs are undrivable. The signage is pathetic -- it's pretty much impossible for a tourist to drive from JFK to Manhattan (one needs to know to take the Northbound Van Wick -- you'll only encounter signs to Manhattan after a few miles).

After hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, CommonDreams posted a pictorial, "without comment," titled "Their Levees - Our Levees." It's anecdotal, of course, and no doubt the photos selected were not entirely unbiased, but I thought it drove the point home pretty well ...

Here's how the British hold back the waters from flooding London:

And the Dutch solution to protecting an entire nation that mostly rests below sea level:

The Italians are defending their city on the sea, Venice:

And...

Here's how the richest, most powerful and technologically advanced
nation on earth protected against the long-forecasted flooding of New Orleans:

When I lived in Germany, I remember things running pretty darn smoothly -- their shiny infrastructure felt so modern next to our decrepit 19th century roads, rails, bridges, etc. I paid higher taxes, of course, but the $400 bucks I've blown on new tires and rims has to be included in that, and that's a tiny microcosm of the costs that we bear as a society for a creaky and crumbling old public sphere. We don't have single-payer healthcare because everyone's too afraid of being a socialist to propose it, but our people and corporations are being buried under sky-high premiums and others are priced out of health care altogether. I paid more taxes when I lived in Germany, but when I broke my finger, without health insurance, I got it examined, X-rayed, set and they even gave me a handful of happy pills for the pain. Cost me $10.

In June, yet another aging bridge spanning the Mississippi River was closed in Minnesota -- the fourth in recent years. The Star Tribune reported that "the inability to use the bridge, a vital regional link between Minnesota and Wisconsin, will be a major nuisance for those living in the southeastern corner of the state. Without it, river-crossing commuters will face 70 to 105 miles of extra driving per day via other bridges south or north of Winona." What are those folks paying in gas to drive an extra 70 to 105 miles to get to their cubicles every day?

Those are just economic costs, which ignore the aggravation factor -- It would take a far more gifted writer than I to convey how incredibly pissed off I was after blowing out that tire. (Used rim for a 10 year-old VW: $60. Cheapo tire manufactured in South Korea: $35. Half hour of labor: $30. Blood pressure-elevating frustration: quite costly.)

The thing that I find striking about all this is that the New Right's obsessive anti-tax crusade is perfectly ideological and profoundly impractical. Investing in infrastructure isn't some airy-fairy liberal "social engineering" project -- we're not talking about hand-outs to the needy or affirmative action programs -- it's vitally important for everyone, including, I should add, big business. But they've run on the simplistic and ideological belief that taxes are bad, as opposed to the evidence-based truth that overtaxation and undertaxation are both problematic.

They cry about the U.S.'s awful tax burden, they say it makes us less competitive. The reality is that we rank 28th out of the 30 wealthy countries in the OECD in terms of overall tax burden -- we're taxed at among the lowest rates in the developed world.

The Right's tax fantasies lead them, when in power, to hand out tax-cuts even while they spend like drunken sailors on a binge. The personal equivalent would be running up your credit card to buy stuff you can't afford -- where's the personal responsibility in that? They are borrow-and-spend maniacs, and our grandkids will still be paying the price for their profligacy. Check this graph out, and imagine how much trouble you'd be in if it were the balance on your Visa card:

(click for larger version)

The thing about public infrastructure is that it is public, and movement conservatives simply hate that. But the self-evident truth is that the private sector ain't going to patch those potholes. In one of his better offerings, Michael Kinsley described the folly of knee-jerk anti-governmentalism (AKA libertarianism, or, in its most disingenuous form, "glibertarianism"):

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can't. Hey, let's issue stamps, y'see, and use the revenues to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to user it -- and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competition with other routes keeps it all efficient. And what about, um, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own both roads at major intersections, and when that happened the company would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own, and maintain all the roads, and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government.

The Right has created a win-win situation in which we all end up losing. They get elected on anti-government populism and bullshit culture war non-issues, then, in power, because they hate the idea of the public square, they govern in the interests of themselves and their cronies -- the govern incompetently -- and that results in widespread dissatisfaction with government that supports their 'drown it in the bathtub' ideology further.

I am sick of this shit. And when I see the clowns we keep electing just letting the country fall apart, I realize that it's true -- I pretty much do hate America, or at least the way it's being run today (into the ground, it often seems).

A popular right-wing narrative in recent years is that liberalism is exhausted of new ideas -- we're incorrigible sentimentalists stuck in the FDR era. Perhaps there's some kernel of truth to that, but one must remember that everything new is not necessarily good (as my grandmother constantly reminds me). When one considers the sorry state of our public spaces, and the economic pain so many people without well-compensated skills are suffering, FDR's public works programs start to look like a pretty darn good idea.

Tagged as: public sector, borrow-and-spend, anti-governmentalism, minnesota bridge collapse, infrastructure

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.