A two-fer - first from AutoBlog:
Find out which bridges near you are 'structurally deficient'
America's road network isn't in amazing shape. A new report from the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) confirms a massive problem. The organization's report takes a look at the condition of bridges in the US, and finds that nationwide, just over nine percent of the country's bridges are "structurally deficient."
ARTBA's website also has a map that shows how many bridges in each state are in need of repair or replacement. It even provides locations of each bridge when you click on a state, in case you're interested in seeing whether the bridge you cross on the way to work is sound or deficient. According to the map, there are 23 states where more than 9 percent of the bridges are structurally deficient. On the flip side, citizens of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Washington D.C. can take pride that less than 5 percent of each location's bridges are in the deficient category.
Which begs the question, what happened to the one trillion dollars that Obama spent to upgrade our nation's infrastructure - this second post by Christina Hoff Sommers in The Weekly Standard explains it all - the spending was politically driven, not fact or data driven:
No Country for Burly Men
A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men.
And what happened:
Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. He called for a two-year "shovel ready" stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.
Women's groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like "Where are the New Jobs for Women?" and "The Macho Stimulus Plan." A group of "notable feminist economists" circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to "institute apprenticeships" to train women for "at least one third" of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a "heavily male-dominated field" like construction: "We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges." As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE-- Women's Equality Adds Value to the Economy.
So much money wasted and we have so little to show for it.
Sometimes it is hard to grasp the reality of large numbers. To understand how large one trillion dollars is, take it and spend ten thousand dollars each day. You would run out of money in 273,972 years. That big. Spend ten thousand dollars every minute, you would exhaust your money in 190 years.
Our National Debt is $19,976,716,000,000 - it was around $10 trillion when Obama took office.
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