This is America's future

There's a certain smugness about this article in today's New York Times about how Monday's breach of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam in Siberia is indicative of a larger general failure of Soviet-era infrastructure. The implication is that this kind of thing simply couldn't happen here because of good old American capitalism and private ownership. Under the surface of its ostensible subject, there's standard conservative boilerplate over evils of government-run anything:

Sayano-Shushenskaya and similar dams built by the Soviet Union’s command economy provided copious, cheap hydropower, and many businesses benefited. Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum company with many smelters in Siberia, took advantage of bountiful supply and cheap prices as it ramped up operations over the last decade.

Rusal consumed about 70 percent of the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam’s output. Rusal’s owner, the oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, once claimed that the Russian aluminum industry would outgrow America’s because cheap Siberian electricity provided an unbeatable advantage.

In fact, all of Russia’s economy grew on roads, pipelines, electrical transmission towers and other infrastructure built by the Soviets, but idled during the deep post-Soviet recession. This helped facilitate rapid economic growth.

But metal fatigues and snaps, gear teeth chip, grind and stick, oil pipes burst and leak, roads and bridges crack and buckle, and agricultural machinery fails during harvest.

A dearth of capital investment from the late 1980s until around 2005 left Russia with badly decrepit infrastructure. The nadir was probably in 2004, when the state statistics agency calculated that Russian capital equipment was, on average, 21.5 years old — compared with about 10 years in most Western economies, said Yaroslav D. Lissovolik, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank in Moscow.

“To re-equip Russia’s industrial base will take decades, not just two or three years,” Mr. Lissovolik said. “This is a long-term challenge.”

It has been a long-term challenge for a while. Long anticipated, the breakdown of Soviet infrastructure began in earnest this decade.

Think now about the power plants near where you live. Or the dams. Or the roads on which you drive. I know that here in New Jersey, the point on Route 46 West near where it merges with Route 3 was until recently only drivable at about 45mph because of the scattershot potholes that pocked this section of the roads. I've driven on bridges where the pavement was so shot that you could see the webbing underneath.

Who can forget this:

That's the 2007 collapse of Minnesota's I-35W Bridge in 2007. Warnings of the bridge's structural deficiency had been made since 1990. And that's just one example of our own crumbling infrastructure right here in the US as tax cuts and unnecessary wars have taken priority over maintenance:

More than one in four of America's nearly 600,000 bridges need significant repairs or are burdened with more traffic than they were designed to carry, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

A third of the country's major roadways are in substandard condition -- a significant factor in a third of the more than 43,000 traffic fatalities each year, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Traffic jams waste 4 billion hours of commuters' time and nearly 3 billion gallons of gasoline a year, the Texas Transportation Institute calculates.

Dams, too, are at risk. The number of dams that could fail has grown 134% since 1999 to 3,346, and more than 1,300 of those are "high-hazard," meaning their collapse would threaten lives, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) found. More than a third of dam failures or near failures since 1874 have happened in the last decade.

Underground, aging and inadequate sewer systems spill an estimated 1.26 trillion gallons of untreated sewage every year, resulting in an estimated $50.6 billion in cleanup costs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"Much of America is held together by Scotch tape, bailing wire and prayers," said Donald F. Kettl, director of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fixing these problems and others threatening the nation's critical infrastructure would cost $1.6 trillion -- more than half of the annual federal budget, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates. And that doesn't include what it will cost for new capacity to serve a growing population.

Recognizing the importance of structures so integral to U.S. commerce and Americans' well-being and safety, local, state and federal governments already are budgeting nearly two-thirds of the $1.6 trillion needed for infrastructure work. The problem is they raid many of those funds for other purposes, ASCE says.

Coming up with new money to fill the funding gap has become a political nightmare, with politicians and the public trying to avoid anything that looks like a higher tax.

"We have convinced ourselves that infrastructure is free, that someone else should be paying or that we have paid our share," said Mike Pagano, an urban planning expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Cash-strapped local governments are resorting to things like selling naming rights to subway stations to raise cash -- but naming rights don't actually sell these infrastructures to the companies that purchase these rights. How many corporations, focuses on maximizing profits, are going to want to buy roads and bridges and other necessary parts of the American economy unless they can make a sizable profit from them?

I think about the outcry every time the tolls go up on the roads around here. Imagine paying, say, $5.00 at every tollbooth on the Toyota Garden State Parkway, or $20.00 each way to cross the Washington Mutual Bridge in upper Manhattan or the Lincoln Federal Savings Tunnel in midtown. Does anyone actually think that corporations are going to maintain our infrastructure any better than governments do? Take a look at the IT infrastructure of any corporation and at how they view the employees who maintain it. Do you know any network administrator whose employer doesn't think of him or her as just a cost center with no revenue benefit to the company? If you work for a company with an outsourced help desk, sent to another country to minimize costs, when was the last time you actually had a problem solved?

Some things are just not profitable and the only way to make them profitable is to render them off-limits to a vast majority of the population. The problem with infrastructure is not that government can't handle it. The part of Route 46 I mentioned earlier has now been paved and the merge has actually been improved to provide more road length for traffic combining from two center lanes to one. The problem is, as quoted above, that Americans think that roads and schools and bridges and dams and railroad tracks are "free" the way they think the drinks and meals at an all-inclusive resort are "free", not realizing that the cost of these things is contained in the price they pay for the room.

Too many people think that taxes = welfare. Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" (who turned out to be a wealthy woman embezzling the government) is still very real in the public imagination. Ronald Reagan convinced Americans that taxes only pay for stipends to the undeserving, and that infrastructure is some magic thing built by pixies and is magically self-healing.

Look at the photos of the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam if you like. But they are less an indictment of the former Soviet system than they are a glimpse of America's future if we don't get our heads out of our asses soon.

Smaller government in action

We all know about the billions of dollars being shoveled into Iraq, much of it into the hands of unaccountable private contractors.

Here at home, our basic infrastructure is falling apart:

It would cost at least $140 billion to repair all the nation's bridges if work began immediately, a nationwide safety organization said in a comprehensive report Monday.

"States simply cannot keep up with bridge maintenance," the report warns, adding that 73 percent of U.S. road traffic -- and 90 percent of truck traffic -- travels over state-owned bridges.

Nearly one in four bridges needs repairs, and the average age of America's bridges is 43 years -- seven years shy of the maximum age for which most are designed, according to the report, titled "Bridging the Gap."

One in five U.S. bridges is more than 50 years old, the report says.

And yet there is little sense of urgency on Capitol Hill to do anything about it. Last Thursday the House passed legislation that would provide $1 billion for bridge repair -- barely a fraction of the amount needed. And yet this same Congress has given blank checks for Iraq for five years. I often wonder why so much lip service is given to "national defense" and almost none given to having something to defend.

UPDATE: From the "Great Minds Think Alike" file, Joshua Holland has more on our crumbling infrastructure.

The consequences of tax cuts

Funny how Republicans change their minds about taxes when a high-profile disaster takes place in their own state.

With giant maw of the 24/7 news cycle requiring constant feeding, most of the cable news time has been taken up for four days now with the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis -- and now that they're running out of human interest stories, the fact of neglect of this country's infrastructure, largely due to Republican policies of low taxes and spending and the resulting deferred maintenance, is becoming clear.

And suddenly, the tune changes:

In the past two years, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota twice vetoed legislation to raise the state’s gas tax to pay for transportation needs.

Now, with at least five people dead in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge here, Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican, appears to have had a change of heart.

“He’s open to that,” Brian McClung, a spokesman for the governor, said Monday of a higher gas tax. “He believes we need to do everything we can to address this situation and the extraordinary costs.”

Even as the cause of the bridge disaster here remains under investigation, the collapse is changing a lot of minds about spending priorities. It has focused national attention on the crumbling condition of America’s roadways and bridges — and on the financial and political neglect they have received in Washington and many state capitals.

Despite historic highs in transportation spending, the political muscle of lawmakers, rather than dire need, has typically driven where much of the money goes. That has often meant construction of new, politically popular roads and transit projects rather than the mundane work of maintaining the worn-out ones.

The grunt work of keeping roads and bridges under repairs doesn't generate the opportunity for smiling politicians to cut ribbons while surrounded by smiling and applauding citizens. If it's not glamorous, and it doesn't directly contribute to a politician's re-election chances, it doesn't get done.

The irony is that we are in a time when individuals have been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain and update their homes, but have allowed their leaders to defer maintenance on the larger "home" that is the community and state in which they live. Crumbling roads and bridges are every bit as unsafe as a termite-eaten, mouse-accessible house. If there were a house in every neighborhood that was as neglected as many of the bridges in this country, the neighbors would scream at authorities to do something.

If we had any kind of Democratic leadership at all capable of framing an idea in a way that the simple-minded fools who have fallen for the "All government spending = welfare for lazy minorities" meme that has been drummed into their heads since the Reagan years, this would be a perfect time to demonstrate what government spending does. But alas, we don't.