Why Not a New Deal Financed by Workers?

Friday, 19 April 2013 00:00  
By Joe Guinan and Thomas M. Hanna, Truthout | Op-Ed 

America's infrastructure is in disrepair, but the Obama administration's proposed solution emphasizes public-private partnerships with all the risks they entail. Instead, a true partner for rebuilding America can be found in the untapped potential of workers' vast pension fund assets. Such an approach could create important institutional alliances of state and local governments, public workers and labor unions, and lay the basis for a very different pattern of political economy capable of reversing spiraling inequality and displacing corporate power.

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Last month, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released their quadrennial report card on the state of America's infrastructure - the roads, bridges, ports, railways, airports, levees, dams and public buildings that make up the core of the built environment and the basis of the US economy. Overall, the United States scored a disappointing D+, a slight improvement over 2009's D rating, but still a desperately poor grade. The physical fabric of America is literally crumbling away.

Underinvestment in basic infrastructure impacts everything from economic performance to health and safety. A recent report found that Americans spend almost 5 billion hours a year in traffic, wasting nearly 2 billion gallons of gasoline at a cost to the economy in excess of $100 billion. "More time on lower quality roads," the Economist reported in 2011, "makes for a deadlier transport network." The road fatality rate in America that year was 60 percent higher than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average.