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COVID-19 has shown us where we have multiple deficiencies with our infrastructures. This even at the level of insufficient PPE for First Responders.
It has shown us our weaknesses in other infrastructures as well, notably: energy, broadband, and schools increasing their urgency and priorities.
Infrastructure Deficiencies & Priorities Exposed by COVID-19
Personal Protection Equipment
Personal Protection Equipment
Personal Protection Equipment
The availability and distribution of PPE and other medical supplies was not only a scramble, but also a scandal. This included ALL first responders from fire, police, ER, other hospital staff and other essential employees,
Hospitals and Health Care
Personal Protection Equipment
Personal Protection Equipment
The shortage and deficiency of hospitals, available beds in existing hospitals and ICU have made the creation of COVID-camps necessary. This is most true for rural communities.
Broadband & Internet
Personal Protection Equipment
Broadband & Internet
Due to the necessity for social distancing, many were forced to rely upon e-commerce for their purchases, including groceries. The lack of broadband access compounded this problem.
Schools
Electricity Generation & Transmission
Broadband & Internet
Our schools have needed modernization, as has education generally due to the expanding technologies. COVID-19 now makes it necessary to retrofit all school ventilation systems ahead of other structural needs of existing schools and their expansion, in addition to PPE for staff and students.
Electricity Generation & Transmission
Electricity Generation & Transmission
Electricity Generation & Transmission
As many, who still are employed, must work from home, increasing electrical demands. Likewise, the economic impacts have slowed the migration to renewable energy sources, notably residential solar.
Water Management
Electricity Generation & Transmission
Electricity Generation & Transmission
Needed water, sewage, and storm water mitigation projects have been put on hold or delayed due to the budget restriction by many communities as the result of lost revenue from diminished economic activities.
Projects Necessary for Economic Recovery & Growth
Roads & Bridges
Mass Transit & Rail
Mass Transit & Rail
With the diminish use, repair of existing roads, vs. new roads is the new priority. These infrastructure projects are done outdoors, making these jobs more safe to perform than the indoor office, retail, and hospitality industries.
Mass Transit & Rail
Mass Transit & Rail
Mass Transit & Rail
With the diminish use, repair of existing roads, vs. new roads is the new priority. These infrastructure projects are done outdoors, making these jobs more safe to perform than the indoor office, retail, and hospitality industries.
Airports & Seaports
Mass Transit & Rail
Airports & Seaports
With the diminish use, repair of existing roads, vs. new roads is the new priority. These infrastructure projects are done outdoors, making these jobs more safe to perform than the indoor office, retail, and hospitality industries.
Airports & Seaports
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COVID-19 & Infrastructure
OPINION: Has COVID-19 Revealed the Need and the Road to Recovery for Our Sick Economy
In every disastrous and catastrophic situation, there are always opportunities. Opportunities to learn to prevent future disasters, opportunities to remedy and improve things long overlooked and neglected, and opportunities to turn losses into profits & benefits.
Americans are reputed and revered for our abilities to turn tragedies into triumphs, because of our 'Yankee ingenuity', when we look at every challenge as an opportunity. Our 'can do' spirit is in our national DNA.
Winston Churchill famously said: “Good luck, is where opportunity meets preparation”. COVID-19 has forced us to pause everything, which gives us the time and the chance to reflect and prepare to look for the opportunities found in our infrastructure, to build our fortunate future.
Our national infrastructure has long been something we've neglected, yet our development and dependence on it as a civilization is what led us to be the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, and the envy of the world. COVID-19 is an act of nature. Our response to it to, use of it's disturbance as an opportunity to assess, plan, and address our infrastructure, is an act of our nature.
While we lulled and slumbered, COVID-19, the tiniest of electron-microscopic organism, has effectively halted and crippled our mighty national economy, or at a minimum has reduced it to the levels of a “Great Recession” on the pot-hole ridden road to a “Great Depression”. COVID-19 now compels us to look for our opportunities for economic recovery and growth, which lies in our infrastructure.
Infrastructure is far more than patching potholes; actions by their intention and nature are a short-term and short-sighted fixes. We now need to view all forms of infrastructure projects comprehensively as our road to recovery and our opportunity to build bridges to our future in every way this means.
COVID-19 revealed our critical infrastructure deficiencies and priorities: the electricity grid, broadband communications, water systems, storm water abatement/flood control, sewage systems, roads, bridges, airports and seaports, among other projects including our future-building schools needing immediate attention.
History is cyclothematic. In 1905 George Santayana in his “The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (Vol. 1)” said in words to the effect, which others have said in derived variants: “He who does not learn from history, is doomed to repeat it”.
Conversely in our current situation, when it comes to addressing both COVID-19 and our infrastructure, we need to learn from history, because in many ways we need to glean from it to seize the opportunities now available to prosper from both our history and our infrastructure.
As we collectively sit isolated, stunned and paralized, looking out our windows at the uncomfortable stillness, there should be unanymous agreement that when it comes to our history and our infrastructure, we now desperately need to repeat both our history of 'can do' and our investments in infrastructure.
In our opportunity for reflection, we now find ourselves in deja vu of history repeating reminiscence to what faced our nation and our president in 1933 and I believe we all to agree that Donald J. Trump is not, by any definition or description, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
FDR had various infrastructure projects that he used to stimulate the economy. These included: WPA, TVA, CCC, and SEC (financial security); which are those most commonly known. Due to his disability, FDR had the instinct and ability to adapt and make every step he took to be calculating and measured.
However, with all of the challenges he had, FDR was not handicapped by trillions of dollars of foolish deficit spending/squandering ourselves to a $24.2 trillion national debt, including debt created by our altruistic and generous giving of subsidies and tax breaks to those who we seemingly valued to be the more deserving large corporations and the ultra-wealthy, so that their virtual Wall Street took precedence over our common-folks' pot-hole permeated Main Street.
As we gaze upon the tumbling tumbleweeds of our passing fortunes, we recall during the Trump Administration, there have been multiple “Infrastructure Week” announced with great fanfare, which never materialized or manifested beyond a 1-day news cycle declaration, because some other issue or titillating scandal took the oxygen out of the newsroom.
It is easy to ignore, what we have long taken for granted, when a new shiny object distracts us, but as we now sit idle, we realize we've been idle all along and for far too long.
In fairness to Trump and notwithstanding his well reported and reputed flaws of Shakespearean and Greek tragedy magnitude and proportions, he is not alone with his grandiose announcements of several ambitious infrastructure plans, which have yielded nothing.
No surprise here given these had a microcosm with his initial promised infrastructure financing 'stable genius' generated model of building a wall and getting Mexico to pay for it. But he is not the first to 'shovel it', when it comes to purported shovel-ready infrastructure projects.
Going back to the Eisenhower Administration, infrastructure largely has been ignored by previous administrations also, where it was also touted and talked about with great bravado and lip service. Ultimately all that was done, if anything, were promises to pave the path to our futures, with short-sighted and short-term patches in the holes of our eroding economy.
But if we are to be honest with ourselves and each other, our infrastructure has been ignored by our politicians, because it has been ignored by us. Our idleness has led to our now collective idle isolation. The period of all of our collective complacency now must come to an end, because now is the time to look for and to seize opportunities, so that the tumbleweeds of our tolerance are not the only things passing us by regarding our roads to recovery.
In addition to Trump's multiple expensive infrastructure announcements/plans, members of congress (DeFazio, 2020 - $760B; S.2302; etc.) have proposed several variations of infrastructure legislation that have proven to be a 'bridge to nowhere'.
However, these were fragmented approaches, frameworks, and general outlines, not and by no means a pragmatic comprehensive plan. We now desperately need a pragmatic comprehensive plan, as we look for/at and then take advantage of the opportunities, which are now afforded to us, or we will continue to gaze powerless at the passing tumbleweeds of time.
Nature has emphatically shown us we need to manage our opportunities and natural resources wisely. Just throwing money at a generalized outline to address infrastructure and giving our money to the wealthy, in foolish belief this makes us prosper, makes about as much sense as drinking Clorox to cure COVID-19. It will also have the same effect. Yet indiscriminately throwing money at (away) undefined patch-work of projects and priorities is precisely what we've done.
This isn't a criticism of congress or a condemnation of legislating the short-sighted. In contrast, it provides a glimmer of hope exists that there are those in congress, who take infrastructure seriously and if/when presented with a comprehensive and pragmatic plan, congress will eagerly embrace it and enact it. Most certainly as this in an election year and our situation is desperate.
One such bi-partisan congressional plan was the Green New Deal (GND), albeit itself lacking implementation plan, priorities, and cost-effectiveness accounting, with dynamic scoring.
If we looked at the GND through the lens of an economist, in addition to an environmentalist, while also giving focus to proven ideas/plans such as FDR's “New Deal”; we just might see a solution and elect to act to end our now forced idleness, by considering all of the opportunities. If we are to follow a Keynesian economic model, let's focus on the first part of 'return' in ROI.
Addressing our infrastructure with Green-Energy and related jobs will create millions of opportunities, including those to manufacture materials needed for infrastructure projects. These cannot be out-sourced or sent off-shore.
These projects include natural resource management of solar, wind & water (which is somewhat a repeat of FDR's TVA). These energy and broadband projects lead to the water (potable, storm water, sewage) projects and the segue remains consistent with a natural resources management theme. The roads/bridges and other infrastructure needs become a natural bi-product and all of these projects create materials manufacturing and good-paying/family-sustaining jobs.
Now the 'plaguing' issue and question. How to pay for it, when Trump has put us into a deeper hole with “trickle-down economics” tax cuts for the large corporations and the ultra-wealthy, leading to de facto feudalism? We need to remember, in our time of reflection, in our history we rejected feudalism in 1776 and we must today recognize it sure isn't working for us now either.
Given we, the taxpayers, are going to have to pay for it, as we always do, it seems only fair that we should also prosper from it as investors, both short and long term. There are ways to do this, using existing tax laws and also encouraging congress (who writes tax laws) to enact legislation which promotes and encourages investment and economic growth/recovery through our infrastructure, to be shared by the average taxpayer.
So instead of increasing the National Debt and federal taxes, federal taxes would be reduced, by investing in our infrastructure. We need to stop staring out the window in despair and embrace our window of opportunities and pave our road to the future with our infrastructure.
Average taxpayers won't be the only investors. Corporations have over $4 trillion of funds off-shore for tax-avoidance purposes. There are existing tax laws where they can repatriate this money and pay no taxes. Public pension funds, who need solid lon-term/stable investments for their stability, have another $4.33 trillion availabl3.
Therefore, in addition to lowering the investing taxpayers' taxes by 20%, there is a total of $8.33 trillion of available money to immediately jump-start infrastructure projects and thus almost instantly jump-start the economy.
Many members of congress (both parties and bicameral) are aware of these facts. Likewise the major banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, bond brokers, investment firms, financial advisers, and others are aware of this approach and methods/plan framework, which while having a strong backbone, is flexible enough to accommodate many situations and applications.
They've really not done anything about this, so it is up to us, the folks who pay for it, in all of the ways this means, to get to work and employ it, if we are going to get back to work and be employed. It is time to open the windows of opportunities, rather than staring out the window at the want and the waste.
After all, given history is cyclothematic, if we are to be who ultimately pays for it, we the Americans need to be who ultimately profits and prospers from it too. COVID-19 has shown us we really have no choice and the time has come to seize the opportunities to cure the ills of our infrastructure and economy.
We can do this, because we're the UnitedStates of Americans, living in the land of opportunities.
Will Griffin, Ed.D. is a physically-challenged from birth and now 'semi-retired' administrative and e-commerce consultant and entrepreneur, currently owning 100 top-level e-commerce websites (34 relating to infrastructure, including infrastructure-financing.com), who has developed methods, plans, and strategies; as the product of researching global infrastructure projects on a daily basis for over 12 years.
