Portside

This isn’t simply about a short-term budget fight. This is about whether we have a president and an electorate united in moving forward a sane economic platform that will strengthen the American economy in the uncertain years ahead, or if we will allow the ideologues and big-money interests to succeed in taking the wheels of the American economy and driving us all off a cliff.

Former CA Governor Schwarzenegger once called it “stuff [I] used to blow up in the movies.” America’s infrastructure—highways, railways, bridges and thruways—now face a doom worse than the Terminator ever imagined: destruction from the rust, decay and corrosion of trillions of dollars worth of old tracks, canals, ports, structures and causeways that carry our trade and traffic all over the United States. Every $1 billion of federal investment creates about 13,000 jobs.

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If the top one percent were taxed at the same rate as the middle 20 percent, states and localities would raise $68 billion per year. Similarly, if the top 20 percent paid the same as the middle 20 percent, states and localities would generate $128 billion each year.

How will pay for high-quality transportation infrastructure, including roads, trains, bicycles, planes and other multimodal forms of transportation. Here are three under-reported infrastructure privatization issues we need to pay attention to. First, who actually benefits from and pays for infrastructure? Second, how are opinion makers talking about privatized infrastructure? Third, what is the quality of the process used to build large infrastructure projects?

Google is bringing a fiber-optic data network to homeowners in Kansas City, Mo., and Kan., but without the usual regulations. That means underprivileged neighborhoods may be left in the digital dust.