our crumbling infrastructure.

New York Magazine on the state of our failing economy and national infrastructure:

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama floated a proposal for a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would deploy $60 billion over ten years to guarantee loans and assist localities in floating bond issues. That sounds like a lot of money until you start going through the country’s to-do list. The American Society of Civil Engineers concluded in a 2005 study that the country’s infrastructure was rotting faster than it could be repaired, and that it would cost $1.6 trillion to avert a plague of exhausted levees, rampant blackouts, crumbling bridges, dysfunctional trains, and streams of filth gushing into waterways.

In a true repetition of history, it seems that the two growing problems might be able to help each other:

With another depression lurking just out of sight, a Calatrava over the Hudson would recall a period that America seems halfway ready to reprise: the New Deal. In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, much of the country was making do with Victorian bridges, horse-and-buggy roads, and improvised sanitation. FDR began binding the country together with sinews of concrete and cable. We need to do for the 21st century what FDR did for the twentieth—invest in worn-out highways, our frail electrical grid, our public transit, brittle bridges, and water supplies. A new New Deal, equipped with an Obama-era version of the Works Progress Administration, could put millions back to work, modernize the country, nudge the economy towards recovery, and produce a barrage of working monuments. It would be a stimulus package that keeps on stimulating long into the future.