Infrastructure Bill

(This is the text of a speech I made in Toastmasters club last year.)

I was a bit surprised to come across the word infrastructure in the last presidential elections. 

I had assumed earlier that infrastructure is important only to developing countries. 

A developing country is in the category of a developing country because it does not have a strong industrial base. 

Usually the issues discussed and debated in US elections are gay rights, abortion, fine tuning Medicare and when it comes to foreign policy it could be nuclear treaties or trade treaties, or china's record on human rights. 

So why was infrastructure an important issue in the last elections? 

The word infra means below. 

Infrastructure is the underlying structure of a country and it's economy and the fixed installations it needs in order to function. 

These include roads, bridges, dams, railways, sub-ways, airports and harbors. 

These are built by the government and owned by the public. 

Recently, on November 15, 2021 the Congress passed the bipartisan infrastructure law also known as infrastructure investment and jobs act. 

Reading about all that this law entails and provides for I was able to understand the question as to why a first world super power nation needed an infrastructure bill. 

In a speech by president Biden that I heard on TV I heard it mentioned that the US had the best infrastructure system in the world during a major part of the 20th century. 

Successive US governments invested in a state of the art interstate infrastructure system in the world which lead to the best roads, highways, railways, bridges, transit system etc in the world. 

These are the arteries of commerce that moved goods from coast to coast that helped US companies to become the best in the world and created unprecedented opportunities for people to live and work in the US. 

It is no longer true. 

Today the infrastructure system in the US ranks 13th in the world, a rating made by the World Economic Forum. 

I read the entire text of the bill and it states that the American infrastructure is crumbling. 

The bill provides for 1.3 trillion dollars investment to upgrade, modernize, and transform most sectors of infrastructure. 

Currently upto 10 million American households and 400,000 schools and child care centers lack safe drinking water. 

170 million times a day US motorists drive across structurally deficient bridges.  

More than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no high speed

 broadband internet. 

According to the latest OECD data among 35 countries studied the US has the second highest broadband costs. 

No US airport ranks in the top 25 of airports world wide. 

Major provisions of this bill are as follows. 

$39 billion dollars to modernize public transit. 

$66 million for Amtrak maintanance and expansion. 

$110 billion for Amtrak roads and bridges. 

$65 billion to expand broadband. 

111 million for transportation. 

7 .5 billion for electric vehicle

Zero emission and low emission school buses and ferries. 

This bill also seeks to put America back on track to win the economic war with other countries. 

In the months to come we will see 1.2 trillion dollars being poured into modernizing roads, transforming public transport, building airports and revitalizing rails and harbors.