Getting America back on track
Rebuild rail, roads, bridges
Can you imagine catching a train in New York and being in Washington in 40 minutes? Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, can. That’s the not-too-distant prospect for Japanese travelers from Tokyo to Nagoya, about the same distance, aboard a mag- lev train running frictionless just above magnetized track. He was looking 20 years or so ahead, speaking in the week of the UN General Assembly.
That’s what leaders do — look ahead. That’s what President Dwight Eisenhower did in 1956 when he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Our unity as nation, he said in February of 1955, depended on individual and commercial movement over a vast system of interstate highways “crisscrossing the country and joining at our national borders with friendly neighbors to the north and south.”
If you can imagine the velocity of that amazing train journey now promised by Abe, do you have enough imagination to see the U.S. Congress agreeing together, in a spirit of national pride and a sense of urgency, to rebuild our country?
Yes, that dreaded word, infrastructure, has to be summoned again. It became a dirty word to the Republican Party. Hostage to the nihilistic Tea Party notion that the best government is the least government, it has been the major obstacle for years to repairing decades of failures to maintain what we have, never mind building something brand new.
The negative reaction to rescuing roads, bridges, dams, power, public transport and airports has been inspired in part by a partisan determination to say “no” to anything the Obama administration has proposed and by genuine concern about how we pay for it all without adding to taxes and the national debt.
We may be at a more propitious moment for that other dreaded word, gridlock, since the presidential candidates seem to be on the same side on this one.
Hillary Clinton has announced a specific $275 billion, five-year plan to rebuild and put Americans to work with the prospects of well-paying jobs for the next generation. Donald Trump has said he would double that figure, albeit without coming close to matching the level of detail Clinton laid out.
She itemizes: Repair and expand roads and bridges. Modernize the national airspace system. Expand public transit options. Connect all Americans to the internet so that by 2020, 100% of households in America will have access to affordable broadband. And modernize dams, levees and wastewater systems.
As it has sadly become clear that growth will not return to prefinancial-crisis levels on its own, the imperative of rebuilding should be obvious, wrote former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in The Washington Post: “Just as the infrastructure failure at Chernobyl was a sign of malaise in the Soviet Union’s last years, profound questions about America’s future are raised by collapsing bridges, children losing IQ points because of lead in the water, an air-traffic control system that does not use GPS technology and chipping paint in thousands of schools.”
What of the Republican opposition? “There’s a compelling case that infrastructure investments pay for themselves by expanding the economy and increasing the tax base,” he wrote.
Productivity in America has been declining for over a decade. We have a challenge in improving our tools and training to make the work we do count more.
Trump has a propensity to offer simple solutions to complex problems with a stubborn insistence that he is always right, never wrong. His impulsivity suggests he is over his head.
We need a leader who can take charge with authority and knowledge, return a sense of discipline to our government and manifest a determination to get this country back on track — on a magnetized track, please! Zuckerman is chairman and publisher of the Daily News.