Where’s the money (for the infrastructure?)
PISSES ME OFF!
In the aftermath of the bridge collapse, CNN spent a half hour blathering today about our crumbling architecture and the money required to fix it.
There are 70,000 more bridges in our country that have been rated structurally deficient, and engineers estimate that fixing these bridges will take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.
$188 billion just for bridges!
N.Y. City has exploding 100-year old steam pipes. The New Orleans levees will never be rebuilt to the level of promises made. Roadways and interstates are starting to fall apart. And forget about our water systems.
What pisses me off is that the answer is plain as day: The money’s all going to Iraq! Well not to the iraqis per se…just the contractors, arms dealers, oil companies, and friends of Dick Cheney’s that have profited obscenely from our ‘mistake’ in the Middle East.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers:
“It will cost $9.4 billion a year for 20 years to eliminate all bridge deficiencies. Long-term underinvestment is compounded by the lack of a Federal transportation program”
Well we are spending $10 billion A MONTH in Iraq. That’s such an unreal number it means nothing to us anymore. But it equates to about $200,000 per minute!
The National Priorities Project has more information on what could be done with this money in the areas of housing, education, health, and college scholarships.
Perhaps the Bushies are determined to enrich themselves even at the cost of making us a third-world country?