If you haven’t noticed lately, America is literally falling apart all around us. Decaying infrastructure is everywhere. Our roads and bridges are crumbling and are full of holes. Our rail system is ancient. Our airports and runways have definitely seen their better days. Aging sewer systems all over the country are leaking raw sewage all over the place.
The power grid is straining to keep up with the ever-increasing thirst of the American people for electricity. Dams are failing at an unprecedented rate. Virtually all of our ports are handling far more traffic than they were ever intended to handle. Meanwhile, our national spending on infrastructure is way down.
America was once a nation that built stuff. Previous generations of Americans constructed the greatest highways, bridges, railroads, ports, dams and water systems that anyone had ever seen. Magnificent new mega-cities were erected from coast to coast, and the rest of the world looked at us with envy.
Ultimately, the keys to all of this infrastructure were handed down to us, and we have really messed things up. We don’t actually build much of anything these days.
In fact, we can’t even maintain the infrastructure that we have been given. As a society we have become extremely lazy and extremely incompetent, and so the great civilization that our forefathers built for us is now crumbling right in front of our eyes.
One out of three bridges in the U.S. needs repair, endangering hundreds of millions of commuters. More than 42,000 bridges across the country, carrying about 167 million vehicles each day, are in disrepair.
It is estimated that 300 million people could face power outages across the United States between 2024 and 2028, due in large part to widespread power grid failures.
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives America’s infrastructure a grade every few years, and the last time they issued a report we were given a C minus.
“In its latest Infrastructure Report Card, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the United States a C- , citing its crumbling public roads, ageing bridges, and deteriorating water mains.”
This year, we were given a C, a slight “improvement” from 2021.
Personally, I believe that a C grade is extremely generous.
After what we have witnessed in recent years, I am entirely convinced that we deserve an F grade when the next report is released.
A few years ago the Volcker Alliance estimated that there is a one trillion dollar backlog of repairs that desperately need to be done.
“The United States is consistently falling short on funding infrastructure maintenance. A report by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker’s Volcker Alliance in 2019 estimated the U.S. has a US$1 trillion backlog of needed repairs.
Over 220,000 bridges across the country—about 33% of the total—require rehabilitation or replacement.
A water main break now occurs somewhere in the U.S. every two minutes, and an estimated 6 million gallons of treated water are lost each day. This is happening at the same time the western United States is implementing water restrictions amid the driest 20-year span in 1,200 years. Similarly, drinking water distribution in the United States relies on over 2 million miles of pipes that have limited life spans.”
Nearly 224,000 U.S. bridges need major repair work or should be replaced, according to ARTBA’s analysis of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) 2021 National Bridge Inventory (NBI) database. That figure represents 36 percent of all U.S. bridges.
In 2022, 60 Minutes did a major report about our crumbling infrastructure, and a dilapidated section of I-95 that runs right through Philadelphia was specifically featured during that show.
“In Philadelphia, Kroft reported on a highly trafficked section of I-95 in need of repair. Those improvements are now underway and scheduled to continue until at least 2028.
The unmistakable orange construction signs along I-95 will soon appear on roads around the U.S. Philadelphia’s I-95 corridor is only a small portion of the 43% of U.S. roads that the 2021 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers said needs to be fixed.”
Sure enough, the repairs never got done, and a portion of the highway completely collapsed in June of 2023.
“Human remains have been found in the wreckage of the Interstate 95 collapse in Philadelphia.
Part of the major US highway, which extends from the Maine-Canada border south to Miami, Florida, collapsed on Sunday after a tanker truck carrying an estimated 8,500 gallons of fuel caught fire.”
Approximately 150,000 vehicles would normally travel through there every day, but now traffic patterns have been thrown into a state of chaos and we are being told that it is going to take months to make the highway operational again.
“I-95 is going to take months to repair, sparking chaos on the major interstate that funnels 150,000 vehicles across the East Coast every day, officials have warned.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro last night said the highway was going to take ‘some months’ before it is running smoothly again following the overpass collapse.”
Of course if this happened in China, the Chinese would probably have the road opened up again in a matter of days.
They know how to do infrastructure.
We don’t.
So now thousands upon thousands of trucks will have to find new routes, and this will cause significant supply chain headaches for the foreseeable future.
Our railroads are falling apart as well, and this has had disastrous consequences.
We all saw what happened in East Palestine, Ohio earlier this year, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2023, there were more than 1,000 train derailments in the United States. When you break that down, it comes out to an average of about three a day.
“There were at least 1,164 train derailments across the country last year, according to data from the Federal Railroad Administration. That means the country is averaging roughly three derailments per day.”
I am certainly not eager to hop on a train any time soon.
Are you?
Of course I am not particularly eager to jump on a plane either.
At this point, our airports are about 40 years old on average, and they desperately need billions upon billions of dollars worth of repairs and improvements.
“In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, U.S airports earned a D+ for both condition and needs. It’s estimated that they will need $115.4 billion over the next five years to address these infrastructure challenges.
Roughly half of all planned airport projects between 2021 and 2025 are terminal-related. At many airports, building upgrades are needed to increase the number of gates and accommodate larger jet aircraft. Flexible and automated baggage handling systems, dynamic wayfinding, and queue management systems projects are needed to ease crowding and improve circulation.”
It is frankly embarrassing to compare our run down airports to the shiny new airports that are going up in Asia and in Europe.
But this is our country now. We are a run down people that live in a run down society that is literally crumbling all around us.
Collapsing bridges, buckling roads, overheated railways, deteriorating power lines, contaminated water lines, outdated public transportation, overtaxed power grids, aging ports and waterways, unsafe tunnels and highways, and spotty or insufficient telecommunications assets are all becoming frequent hallmarks of the American way of life.
If the nation is woefully unprepared to deal with climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts, despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been pledged to shore up the nation’s infrastructure problems, it is because politicians across the political spectrum have failed us.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene makes this failure by the government to put the needs of the American people first painfully evident. Entire towns are under water. Roadways have collapsed or are otherwise impassable. Potable water is scarce. More than 1.5 million households went months without power.
Clearly, our national priorities need to be re-examined.
While the politicians play partisan games with our tax dollars, the nation’s critical infrastructure—both the physical foundations of the nation and the figurative foundations of our freedoms—continues to be neglected and deprioritized in favor of grandstanding, bloated military budgets on endless wars abroad, foreign aid to shore up the infrastructure and military defenses of international allies, and all manner of graft and pork barrel spending.
When all is said and done, the bread-and-circus distractions and sleight-of-hand political theater being trotted out in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms adds nothing of real value to the lives of the average American.
The truth is that the United States has been an empire in decline for decades, and the outlook for the future is extremely bleak if we stay on the road that we are currently on.
Sadly, many people don’t care for such warnings.
Most of them are just going to keep partying for as long as they can, and a lot of them will never realize what is happening until it is far too late to do anything about it.
It’s Time to Fix the Country
For starters, we need an overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure.
According to Time magazine, “Throughout the country, millions of Americans don’t have access to or can’t afford broadband internet service. In excess of 2 million people live without running water or basic plumbing. For too long, the American public has had to carry on while these deficiencies have gone unattended. The political will has been weak or inattentive, the rewards too far removed from electoral advantage.”
In other words, the politicians who dance to the tune of the oligarchic elite aren’t motivated to do anything about our failing infrastructure because they get nothing out of it: no votes, no money, no power.
This isn’t about whether the Republicans or Democrats have better policies.
Indeed, both parties’ priorities are disconcertingly alike: both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
This is about the plight of the American people who continue to be treated like a permanent underclass.
Anyone who believes that this presidential election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naive, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”
When a country spends close to $10 billion to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House, while 38 million of its people live in poverty, and nearly 7 million Americans are out of work, and more than 600,000 Americans are homeless, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.
Overhauling the nation’s infrastructure will take a significant amount of money, which won’t happen as long as the U.S. government continues to fund the military industry complex and its voracious appetite for endless wars.
According to ARTBA, federal funds, on average, provided 54% of annual state DOT capital outlays
for state administered highway & bridge projects in 2022.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
The American Empire is approaching a breaking point.
This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.
Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.
The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.
If we are to have any hope of restoring both the structural and freedom foundations of this nation, we’ll need to start by getting our priorities in order, and that means focusing on what really matters: shoring up our battered Bill of Rights and investing in the American homeland.
- https://www.benzinga.com/11/01/752100/everything-is-falling-apart-20-facts-that-you-will-not-want-to-read-if-you-still-want-t
- https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/america_is_falling_apart_our_national_priorities_are_in_dire_need_of_restructuring
- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/americas-infrastructure-is-collapsing-right-in-front-of-our-eyes/
- https://artbabridgereport.org/state/map
- https://www.artba.org/map_list/
- https://artbabridgereport.org/
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