Is America About To Fall Apart?
by James Glaser
November 18, 2009

I'm not talking government or politics here. I'm talking about bricks and mortar, steel and concrete, and any other materials you build with. If you own a house, you know that you have to plan for repairs or replacement for parts of your house. A roof only lasts so long, and that is the same with the furnace, your water pump, (if you are out in the country) and any other part of the house that sees wear and tear over the years.

Well, our country is no different. We, the public, own a lot of things here in America that wear out over time. A home owner has to budget for repairs, and one would think that we would have to do the same. I have never heard anyone in Washington talk about some special fund we have set up to repair the parts of our infrastructure that wear out.

Lets look at bridges, mostly because I found a report on them. The report is written by Michelle Singer for CBS News back in August of 2007. I haven't heard of any big push to fix our bridges, so this report is still good, just the bridges are a bit older now,

(CBS) The bridges built in the boom years of the Eisenhower Era have entered middle age, and thanks to neglect, they're not aging gracefully: 150,000 U.S. bridges are rated structurally deficient or obsolete. That's more than a quarter of the nation's bridges that are in need of major repairs or replacement.

And it's not just bridges, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes. From steam pipes to the power grid to water mains, much of the nation's infrastructure has not been adequately maintained, much less modernized. experts say. Demand has surged in the past few decades, but the will and money to fund upkeep have not.

It's estimated that the cost of updating the nation's infrastructure would be $1.6 trillion. That's about $5,300 for every American.

The politicians in Washington are about to raise our debt ceiling again, because they have been spending non-stop for about a decade, but they have put nothing away to repair or replace the things in this country we take for granted, like roads, bridges, water treatment plants and sewage plants to name a few.

We are building those very things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we give billions away in foreign aid every year, but do we put away any money for our own country? Nope. Like our ever expanding national debt, our politicians are hoping that things don't fall apart before they retire. That way they can pass the debt and the repair bill on to our future generations, Nice, Huh?

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