America in Decline? - Answers Part IV

Collapsing bridges, collapsing dikes, falling buildings, eroding roads. America's infrastructure is crumbling. How do these things happen in a wealthy, advanced country?

The advocates of decline state that crumbling infrastructure is a result of corruption - political, corporate, and religious. They declare that a disease of greed and corruption has claimed all of the powers of America, and that everyone else has succumbed to a malaise.

However, crumbling infrastructure actually is nothing new in the US. From railroads to dikes to bridges, things get built cheap, they aren't maintained properly, and then they break down.

The first large-scale railroad ties laid down were fashioned of poor material and were poorly fitted, causing them to bend into 'U's when heavy loads were run across them, inevitably leading to derailments and death.

The Hanford Nuclear Reactor is a disaster area because its pieces fit together so poorly.

There are bridges that didn't survive their first windstorm, much less their first earthquake.

Things get built on the cheap. Why? Because the builder gets paid on the margin between what it costs to build and what the buyer is paying. So the builder gets more profit with cheaper materials. And the builder gets more work with cheaper bids. So, low-quality materials, low-skilled labor, and corner-cutting become the norm rather than an aberration.

But there's more.

Once the infrastructure gets built, it often is poorly maintained or not maintained at all. Why? Because, while roads and other infrastructure are highly useful to people once they're built, to the government that had them built, infrastructure is just endless seas of red ink going on forever.

As soon a road or a bridge or anything like that gets put in, it immediately starts to weather and degrade, which means it has to be maintained. However, roads and bridges never earn any money to pay for their maintenance, they just keep having to be paid for, forever. The more roads and bridges that get built, the more that has to be paid out to maintain them.

Well, unless your constituency lets you put in those ever-popular toll booths, or something like them.

That's why governments don't really like to build roads. There's just no money in it. Unlike say re-development projects. There isn't even any prestige, such as there are with vanity projects (name in the papers, bumps in the polls - vanity).

Infrastructure also tends to stick around for a while, even when it's poorly built, as weathering and decay is a slow, decades-long process. So, for a government looking to make a profit (and the philosophy of the last few decades was everything has to make a profit), it is actually quite cost-effective in the short term to short infrastructure maintenance and apply all those saved funds to development or vanity projects. Things with money or prestige involved.

And you keep putting it off. And then your successor puts it off, because he doesn't want to look like he can't do as much as you did. And then, eventually, the unmaintained infrastructure start to break down.

It's all part of the fast-buck. The fame game. The culture of NOW. i.e. America. America as it is as it always has been. And so, declining infrastructure has nothing do with any mark of decline. It is only another blow to the illusion so many had of a special, infallible, and benevolent race of people in America.