Having you ever been walking down the street or a parking lot, when a green-glint caught your eye -- and upon closer inspection: you are $20 richer!
Found Money! Kind of makes your whole day, hey?
Conversely, have you ever been in a rush, moving and rearranging stuff, and later find out to your chagrin: you are $20 lighter?
Lost Money! Kind of ruins your whole day, Dooh!
Well the thunder-struck residents of Washington are about to have several days like that second kind ... they are about to be $15,000,000 lighter:
Skagit River bridge collapse: Looking for a temporary fix to get traffic moving
by Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, yahoo.com -- May 25, 2013
[...]$15,000,000 just to "repair" the obsolete bridge -- NOT to make it "structurally sufficient." Talk about 'Lost Money'! Predictions for Round two, anyone?
[Washington state] Gov. Inslee, a former member of Congress who won the governorship last year, says it will cost $15 million to repair the bridge, which averages 71,000 vehicles a day. Meanwhile, other bridges crossing the Skagit have backed up traffic through residential and business areas.
[...]While the Federal Highway Administration lists the bridge as "functionally obsolete” because it’s an old design, it had not been classified as structurally deficient.
[...]
'Infrastructure Jobs' are not an abstraction. They are real preventive action. They avoid the inevitable costs of repairs or replacement (or abandonment) by fixing those things are "deficient" and "dangerous."
'Infrastructure Jobs' save real money, and save real lives.
Pay to Fix America’s Crumbling Infrastructure Now, or Pay More Later
by David Cay Johnston, theDailyBeast.com -- May 25, 2013
[...]
Every day, cars and trucks carrying more than 200 million people cross over bridges in urban areas that remain in use even though they have exceeded their design life or are in such serious need of major repairs that engineers rate them as structurally deficient.
[...]And it is not just outdated bridges that put lives at risk, as we saw three years ago when a natural-gas pipeline blew up an entire block in a San Francisco, killing eight residents, including a state employee who was investigating whether such aging equipment was safe.
Unless we rebuild and replace our aging infrastructure, it is just a matter of time until we have more such disasters, including another Johnstown Flood.
[...]Right now, governments can borrow at the lowest interest rates in 700 years. Roughly 25 million people are involuntarily forced into part-time work, are looking for work, or have given up because they cannot find a job.
'Infrastructure Jobs' are not an abstraction. They are the difference between living with a backdrop of Lost versus Found Money!
And rarely has it been cheaper for us as a nation, to avoid losing our infrastructure shirts!
