Paid for by NDN.
Investing in Our Common Future: U.S. Infrastructure
by Michael Moynihan, NDN Fellow
November 13, 2007
Click here to read Investing in Our Common Future: U.S. Infrastructure.
Investing in Our Common Future: U.S. Infrastructure
Executive Summary
At a moment when America should be uniting to meet its growing challenges at home and abroad, the failure to maintain our national infrastructure testifies to an ebbing unity of purpose. As the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota, the failure of levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and lesser traumas like the 2003 Northeast blackout have shown, the decline of America’s once great physical plant and eroded national commitment to making investments towards future prosperity have reached crisis proportions.
America has the wealth at its disposal to make needed investments in roads, schools, networks, the environment, and new technologies that are critical to our future. Just as important, however, is a renewed sense of national purpose and will to make these investments. Time and again, when the United States has tackled great projects, it has succeeded — from taming rivers to conquering space to inventing cyberspace. But in every case, it has taken bold leadership to transfer vision to reality.
In this new paper, we propose the following set of measures to restore American economic greatness and make the investments necessary to rebuild and advance America’s infrastructure:
- Measures to reform the budgetary process for infrastructure by creating a national infrastructure bank and
introducing capital budgeting at the national level;
- Methods to improve coordination between the federal government and states and localities; and
- A proposal for Congress to pass a GREEN Act requiring that federal infrastructure and buildings meet a
rising set of environmental standards that not only address issues like global warming but also establish
American leadership in green technologies of the future.
Only by working together can Americans reverse the decline in infrastructure that is eroding our present economy and make the forward-looking public investments needed to ensure future prosperity. The following pages are a call to action to take the steps necessary to establish our country once more as the world’s economic leader.
