Summer break this year was spent bumping and slamming along on the nation’s decrepit highways and getting stymied by the closing of one of the country’s thousands of “structurally deficient,” life-threatening bridges. We drove 3,800 miles through eleven states, rich and poor. In every state, stretches of interstates were calamitously neglected. Many roads were so pocked and torn up in places that one time my sunglasses were literally jarred off my face on an interstate in Georgia when we whacked into a pothole we couldn’t steer around. Passing a massive 18-wheeler on a little bridge in Oklahoma, I was startled to see the concrete on the edges of the span crumbling and chipping with rebar exposed. And the more I looked the more I saw.
This is what happens when a major political party — the Republican party that’s owned the White House off and on recently for almost two decades and acts as an immovable obstruction while it’s out of presidential power — refuses to raise taxes to fix the bottom-line necessities of doing business and living life in relative safety.
The Republican anti-tax fixation has directly resulted in 43%, almost half, of the nation’s four million miles of public roadways falling into “poor or mediocre condition,” to use the words of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
This is what happens when the financial elite, and their ideological flunkies in Congress, deprive the country of vital services on the grounds that taxation for public works is somehow a form of income confiscation from the rich — as if only the very rich pay taxes while the rest of us are welfare frauds, lower-class tax evaders and liberal freeloaders. Everybody pays taxes, of course, or at least those of us who don’t have money to burn do, feeling honorably duty bound to support the public good, and can’t snake through arcane tax loopholes created by the rich to force the modestly well-to-do and working poor to pay more than their fair share.
The modern neo-Confederate Republican Party has let America become a down-at-the heel country, outwardly powerful and aggressive but inwardly shabby, its vital arterials and public works allowed to decay and weaken the nation’s ability to compete economically with more sensible countries and even undermine our defense capabilities. America’s interstate highways, started in the mid 1950s by President Eisenhower, have always served a triple purpose — financial, military, and emergency.
A classic case in point is the Hernando de Soto I-40 bridge over the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee. It’s one of the 46,000 bridges in America that are “structurally deficient.” I-40 is the aorta of cross-country American commerce. Like other interstates it is an indispensable conduit for emergency medical care and first responders to rural America, and a vital part of the country’s national defense.
Built in 1949, and carrying some 65,000 vehicles a day, the de Soto bridge was closed down a few weeks ago because of a huge crack in one of its main, underlying girders. This crack was first noticed six years ago and ignored by Mitch McConnell’s Obama-hating, stonewalling U.S. Senate and by four years of ideologically crazed Trumpian legislators and bureaucrats. A smaller bridge south of Memphis on I-55 has taken the rerouted traffic, but can be backed up sometimes for as long two or three hours. Driving home a few weeks ago, it took a 90 minute drive north to find another bridge, in Missouri, that crosses the Mississippi. There was no traffic there. Major trucking companies had apparently not yet decided on the cost benefits of taking that detour themselves.
The Memphis bridge experience gave me a visceral understanding of the problems that President Biden’s $2 trillion plus infrastructure plan will help to solve — including repairing 20,000 miles of the most seriously damaged highways, rebuilding bridges, renovating airports and transit systems, fortifying the nation’s energy grid and providing high-speed broad band service across the country. It will provide funds to upgrade schools, childcare facilities, veteran’s hospitals and modernize federal buildings. It will help repair some of the country’s 2300 “deficient high-hazard-potential” dams as well.
President Biden proposes to pay for all this by upping corporate taxes, using a 15% minimum tax to make a dent in the chronic and scandalous practice of corporate “underpayment” of taxes. Last year, 55 of America’s largest corporations, including FedEx and Nike, paid no taxes at all and a I bet most of them used public roadways and bridges to help make their profits. FedEx certainly did.
Republican’s, of course, are working to undermine Biden’s proposed infrastructure budget, bellyaching about “tax and spend” Democrats penalizing the wealthy for being successful. They’ll try to strip Biden’s plan of a $1 trillion or more. Such is the corrosive power of ideological propaganda and the Republican equations of wealth with virtue and modest means with shiftless ineptitude, when the exact opposite is probably true. How much physical effort does it actually take to let capital gains and dividends grow compared to holding down two to three part-time jobs just to make ends meet, all the while driving on roads that wreck your car and make your commute a daily nightmare?
Driving along those highways, squeezed among breakneck truck drivers, watching load after load of someone’s profits speeding and tailgating behind us, much of those loads destined to clog up at the broken and neglected de Soto bridge near Memphis, I could feel in my bones the reality of how vast personal and corporate wealth is made, much of it through Big Money’s endless war against its own laboring employees, piling up fortunes historically on the backs of slaves and non-unionized workers forced by circumstances to toil for crumbs while proud genteel folk slap themselves on the back for their own virtuous ingenuity.
Those wretched roads and bridges said so much. Truckers — most all of them in shiny new rigs and deep in debt — driving long, numbing hours, crashing and rattling on highways and across bridges that could derail them and kill off those around them. That’s how our world works until it doesn’t, and people get hurt by a hit-and-run ideology that cheapskates public safety to expand private gain. It’s the malign source of everything from climate change to the working poor and a nation of credit card debtors. Of the seven deadly sins, only hubris can hold its own against greed.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
So good to see you back here, V.B. And with this excellent column in which your own visceral experience on America’s highways and bridges combines with your customary in-depth research to allow us to FEEL the dangerous state of US infrastructure. I hope Biden’s infrastructure fix won’t be decimated by Republican obstructionism to the point where the country must suffer a major bridge or highway disaster to make us understand the imminent dangers we face if we don’t do something soon about the state of the nation’s arteries.
Excellent article Barrett. I’m wondering if the infrastructure bill can be pushed through with reconciliation? Or will Manchin stop even that?
V.B., another great column. Thank you!
The Democrats are culpable as well. Reuters reported last week that Biden announced a massive shift in his fiscal policy, cutting (not raising) corporate taxes even further than had Trump, AND cutting his proposed infrastructure spending bill by hundreds of billions of dollars more following his last week’s proposed spending cuts from $2.25T to $1.7T.
The announcement by Biden is clearly a capitulation to corporate interests, McConnell and Republicans of truly historic dimensions. It’s a ‘double reversal’, not only cutting corporate taxes instead of raising them, but unilaterally, and without obtaining any concessions from Republicans, slashing his infrastructure spending proposals further again, than a week after his prior spending cut of $550B.
Biden now plans CUTTING corporate taxes to 15%. Trump had cut corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden ran for office pledging to raise that back to 28%. He then reneged in February and said the corporate tax hike would be to only 25%. He then agreed with European Union finance ministers last week to cut taxes on US multinationals to only 15%. Now he announces, after latest talks with McConnell and Republicans, he’ll CUT US corporate taxes in general to 15%–instead of raising to even 25%.
Biden will CUT his proposed infrastructure bill further as well. Starting out at $2.25T in March, he last week reduced that to $1.7T. Now, however, he offers to CUT that even further to $1T.
Anyone who thinks Democrats have the interests of US citizens as a priority should check their kool-aid. Your dose has been doubled. Biden, like all Democrats, has betrayed working people and students, but definitely not the military industrial complex, Israel, the police, and corporations. They won’t even pass a pathetic $15 an hour minimum wage. That was Biden’s iron-clad campaign promise. Remember? Nothing for student debt. Nothing for health care. The eviction moratorium is about to expire. Green New Deal? Say what? And now, a pittance for infrastructure, if anything. Check the history. The infrastructure has been crumbling for decades, through Republican and Democrat administrations alike. Spending for the military? You got it, baby! When will we wake up?
I remember 6 6 looking like that when I lived there before 1966.
Here in California the way we pay for many thing is through the price of gas.
Most poor drive cars with good MPG, while the Rich Big cars often with low MPG. New car dealers are turning to electric and tax on that type of car could be raised too.
Very poor take the bus.
There are ways to raise taxes where all incomes pay.
This is an excellent summary of what is a gigantic problem. The problem is reaching proportions of semi-paralysis, that is, our road and bridge infrastructure is literally collapsing.
The forecasts for weather and fire seasons are that each year will be hotter and have more fires and longer fire seasons.