Neither bill comes close to the $262 billion a year that a panel of 80 transportation experts said the nation should spend to rebuild roads, bridges, water lines, sewage systems and dams that are reaching the end of their planned life cycles…The gap between what experts and most members of Congress would like to spend and what’s included in the two bills exists because the Highway Trust Fund no longer takes in enough gas tax revenues to sustain surface transportation needs.

“Clearly this level of funding is inadequate to support our needs as a nation,” said Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center for Transportation. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the shoddy state of America’s surface transportation infrastructure will actually cost the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product over the next decade. The ASCE found that “if the nation’s infrastructure were free of deficient conditions in pavement, bridges, transit vehicles, and track and transit facilities, Americans would earn more personal income and industry would be more productive.”

Not only do House Republicans want to pass a bill woefully underfunding the nation’s infrastructure, they also want to attach approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to the legislation, preferring political theater to actually addressing one of the country’s most urgent needs.

House Republicans, of course, won’t even bring up Obama’s jobs plan, instead deciding that the best way to address America’s crumbling infrastructure is to let loose with “drill, baby, drill“:

House Republicans plan to pass a bill by year’s end that would tie new infrastructure funding to federal revenue generated from an expansion of domestic energy production, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Thursday.

Dubbing it the “opposite of stimulus,” Boehner said the new energy production plan would provide “a new devoted revenue stream” that could pay for the kind of infrastructure spending that President Obama is demanding as part of his jobs package.

Even with the unemployment rate barely creeping down and the U.S. facing a $2 trillion deficit in terms of infrastructure, the GOP refuses to move forward with funding unless it is also allowed to soil the environment through more oil drilling.

And its not as if Boehner’s own state of Ohio couldn’t use some help when it comes to infrastructure. In fact, 27 percent of the bridges in Boehner’s state are either “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” Ohio’s share of the national highway system has 171 bridges that are structurally deficient. 10 of those bridges are even located in Boehner’s own district.

Boehner this week tried to claim that “nobody” has crafted a bill that would fund infrastructure projects, even as Senate Democrats were bringing a bill to the floor that would pay for those projects with a miniscule surtax on the very wealthiest Americans. Instead, Boehner and the rest of the House GOP want to hold the nation’s infrastructure hostage to their Big Oil agenda.

“Everybody believes we have infrastructure deficiencies and more needs to be spent to repair, replace and in some cases build new infrastructure,” Boehner said in a speech. “The problem is nobody wants to pay for it.”

Boehner did not specifically mention the region’s bridge problems, but spoke broadly about transportation needs in his speech as part of the McConnell Center’s fall lecture series at the university.

However, it’s simply not true that “nobody” has tried to craft a bill that both invests in infrastructure and is paid for. President Obama’s American Jobs Act included money for infrastructure and was paid for by higher income taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, plan to hold a vote this week on a bill that combines $50 billion in direct infrastructure spending with another $10 billion to start a national infrastructure bank.

The Senate Democrats’ bill is paid for by a surtax on the very wealthiest Americans that, as Citizens for Tax Justice has found, will affect no more than 0.1 percent of the residents of most states. Far from jumping on board with this plan, Senate Republicans are gearing up to derail it:

A senior Senate Democratic aide predicted Tuesday that not a single Republican would vote for the latest jobs package of $50 billion in infrastructure spending combined with a $10 billion national infrastructure bank.

Senate Democratic leaders hope to vote Thursday on the jobs bill, but they expect the outcome to follow the same lines as the previous two jobs measures Republicans voted unanimously to block.

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted yesterday, “a number of GOP Senators in the past have explicitly endorsed infrastructure spending — in different contexts — as a good way to spur economic growth or maintain economic competitiveness.” For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has said that “if you’re a Republican and you want to create jobs, then you need to invest in infrastructure that will allow us to create jobs.” But now that Obama is proposing just that, the GOP is lining up against him.

Boehner is trying to deflect attention from the GOP’s constant obstruction of infrastructure bills. But tomorrow will provide the perfect test case as to whether “everybody” agrees that infrastructure is a priority, or whether the GOP thinks it’s more important to protect super-low tax rates for the very wealthy.

In his fiery speech, Obama also challenged Republicans to choose their priorities:

Would you rather keep tax loopholes for oil companies? Or do you want construction workers to have a job rebuilding our bridges?

The Brent Space Bridge is both in deteriorating condition and incapable of handling the volume of traffic in the area. United Parcel Service trucks “avoid the bridge as much as possible,” going far out of their way to avoid the bridge’s gridlock. American infrastructure is in rapid decline, falling to 16th in the world behind other industrialized countries and emerging economies. The Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young estimate that the United States has $2 trillion in needed infrastructure repairs.

Obama’s challenge referred to the fact that his $447 billion jobs bill is partly funded by closing $40 billion in oil company subsidies.

The president is offering an alternative to the debate that conservatives want Americans to have, such as the false choice between a healthy economy and a healthy environment.

There was only one problem. OMJC builds and assembles traffic lights, and its business and profits depend on the types of government investments into roads, bridges, and infrastructure that have been consistently proposed by Obama and Democrats and consistently opposed by Bachmann and Republicans, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Standing before a row of shiny orange trailers carrying portable solar-powered traffic lights, she said her plans for a smaller government with fewer rules and lower spending would help OMJC Signal Inc. “grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.”

“That’s my goal — to see you succeed wildly,” the Minnesota congresswoman told a gathering of OMJC workers on the plant floor here in the central Iowa town where she grew up.

But OMJC thrives on the kind of road and bridge spending that Obama has promoted as a key remedy to the nation’s economic slowdown. As much as 80% of OMJC’s revenue comes from government, according to the company’s chief executive, Arlen Yost.

OMJC’s owner told the Times that business has remained stable throughout the recession as the government has maintained investments in infrastructure projects in an attempt to spur the economy. But while Bachmann claims she wants to help OMJC “grow, grow, grow, grow, grow,” her voting record tells a different story. Before Bachmann voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, she and her Republican colleagues worked to reduce the amount of infrastructure spending contained in the package. Bachmann and the GOP opposed a Democratic infrastructure spending plan in 2010. And of Obama’s recent jobs plan, Bachmann said it was full of “temporary gimmicks” and that Congress shouldn’t pass it.

Not only would Bachmann’s policies hurt the business she claimed she wanted to help, they continue to hurt the nation she wants to lead. As ThinkProgress has reported, more than a quarter of America’s bridges are rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In Minnesota, 13 percent of bridges are deficient or obsolete, and nearly a third of the state’s roads are considered poor or mediocre. In Iowa, Bachmann’s birthplace and center of her presidential campaign, 27 percent of the bridges are rated deficient or obsolete, and more than 40 percent of its roads are poor or mediocre. According to recent studies, the U.S. needs as much as $2 trillion just to bring its infrastructure up to date.

Audi, in marketing a car that only the top few percent of Americans can afford, has focused on the mediocre situation of the nation’s infrastructure in a new ad campaign:

The road is not exactly a place of intelligence. Highway maintenance is underfunded, costing drivers 67 billion a year, and countless tires. Which drivers never check, because they’re busy checking email. This is why we engineered a car that makes 2000 decisions every second.

Watch it:

As Audi put it in their press release on the new campaign:

The ads will call attention to jarring facts about today’s driver, as well as the obstacles presented by today’s American road. More importantly, the ads showcase the ability of the Audi A6 to help overcome these obstacles while enhancing driver safety and enjoyment.

Shockingly, 38 million drivers on the road today would not pass their state’s driver’s exam, and across the nation, drivers encounter over 100,000 miles of crumbling highways and bridges.

Is Audi speaking to the portion of America who is enamored with gated communities, ready to pay for their own comfort and security but uncomfortable with (hating the concept of) paying their fair share for the common good?

Places like Haiti take this to an extreme. Living within one’s walls, with guards, life might be fantastic with perfectly paved streets and 24/7 electricity. Cross the wall and the children might be without clothing and the potholes could absorb a normal car — there you don’t need Audis but Range Rovers. Are those Audi is targeting this advertisement at aiming for an American future resembling Haiti?

Audi is, clearly, aiming for “buzz” about how their cars handle traffic and disrupted roads better than their competitors. They may — or may not — be right. The question for all of us is whether the best solution to our common problems derives from the wealthiest few spending dollars to ease their own lives or whether we all give of our means to make all of our lives better and the overall society stronger. Rather than investing $10,000s more in a car that can handle potholed roads, perhaps it would be better for those who have the ability to do so to consider paying a few $1,000s to help build up and maintain the crumbling infrastructure?

In the memo, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) laid out opposition to Obama’s proposed $30 billion to keep teachers and law enforcement officers in their jobs, rejected money for school construction, and again claimed Republicans supported spending on infrastructure. But Boehner wrote that the GOP opposed the way Obama’s plan would make those investments, as Republicans continue to base their opposition to new stimulus plans on the misguided, false belief that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act didn’t work, as The Hill reported:

“Rather than adding more money to a broken system,” Boehner and his deputies wrote, “Congress and the president should spend the next few months working out a multi-year transportation authorization bill that fixes these problems.”

Despite those claims, there is little evidence that Republicans actually support spending the money necessary to bring the nation’s infrastructure up to date. In fact, this is the third major infrastructure investment plan Republicans have opposed since Obama took office in 2009, after it lobbied to reduce the amount of infrastructure-centered spending in the Recovery Act and derailed Democrats’ infrastructure spending plan in 2010.

As ThinkProgress reported last week, roads and bridges in the states and districts represented by GOP leadership are rated “structurally deficient” or “fundamentally obsolete” at rates that outpace the national average. Even knowing that, Republicans continue to make their priorities clear when it comes to creating jobs by fixing America’s infrastructure, as they have again chosen to do nothing while millions of American workers remain unemployed and ready to work on the roads and bridges that are crumbling around them.

Take action and tell Congress it’s time to rebuild America.

Despite McConnell’s rhetoric, Republicans have steadfastly opposed actual attempts to bring America’s infrastructure to 21st century standards, since that would require actually spending money. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) blasted the GOP’s opposition to infrastructure investment under the guise of saving money today, saying if the U.S. didn’t invest in its crumbling roads, its failing bridges, and other areas of infrastructure development, the country is “destined to become a second-rate nation”:

RENDELL: Infrastructure is important in everything that we do. The World Economic Forum, which rated our infrastructure best in the world as early as 2005, has now placed us 15th. In air transport infrastructure, we’re 32nd behind countries like Panama and Malaysia. In port infrastructure, so important to our economy, we’re 18th. In rail infrastructure, we’re 22nd. That’s embarrassing. This country used the be the greatest country in the world, and I believe it still is. But we were the greatest country in the world because we met our challenges. We knew what we had to do. We didn’t worry about what it was going to cost, we worried about how it was going to benefit our people. [...]

Yes, you spend money to build the infrastructure, to make it safe, to improve the quality of our lives, to increase our economic competitiveness. Stop doing it, and America’s destined to become a second-rate power.

Watch it:

Republicans got an example of exactly what Rendell is talking about this week, when the 50-year-old bridge Sherman Minton Bridge spanning the Ohio River between Louisville, Kentucky and New Albany, Indiana closed because of a crack in its structure. The closure is costing both private businesses and the government, as local economies suffer from lapses in productivity and the states divert funds from other programs to fix the bridge.

Putting off investments like one that could have prevented the Sherman Minton’s closure doesn’t save the country money. The longer Republicans continue to prevent the types of meaningful infrastructure investments the country needs, the more expensive it promises those projects will become, and the farther behind the rest of the world the U.S. will fall.

Take action and tell Congress it’s time to rebuild America.

Sherman Minton Bridge in Louisville, KY

The Sherman Minton Bridge, one of three major bridges spanning the Ohio River between Louisville, Kentucky and southern Indiana, was closed Friday after cracks were found in its structure. Roughly a quarter of America’s bridges, and more than a third of Kentucky’s, are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, a problem highlighted by recent reports that the country needs an immediate $2 trillion investment just to bring its infrastructure up to date.

The bridge closure came just days after Sen. Mitch McConnell (R), whose Kentucky home is less than 13 miles from the bridge, derided President Obama’s jobs plan — largely based on infrastructure investment — as a “re-election plan.” McConnell doubled down on those claims Tuesday, saying the plan contained proposals both parties had “already rejected.” Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth (D), who represents Louisville, slammed McConnell’s lack of leadership last night, telling Rachel Maddow that McConnell should “come back to the district” and tell Louisvillians himself that America can’t afford to invest in its roads and bridges:

YARMUTH: What he needs to do is he needs come back to the district, he needs to stand there and talk to the people who are waiting in line and say, ‘You know, we don’t need to be investing in infrastructure, we can’t afford it right now. And ask them to make the sacrifice.’ He’s not willing to do that. Again, to portray what the president has said as just another political act defies reality. He’s staring in the face of something that is of enormous consequence to hundreds of thousands of his constituents. … This affects everybody. Mitch needs to take a leadership role in the Senate to help get this kind of investment adopted by Congress. If he doesn’t step forward, I don’t know how we can get it done. But he needs to. These are his people.

Watch it:

Despite claims that he supports investing in infrastructure, McConnell has continually opposed proposals to do just that. And while he chides Democrats for pushing a plan he claims won’t stimulate the economy, the closing of the Sherman Minton Bridge highlights the costs of not investing in such projects, as it is already extracting huge costs from state governments and private companies.

Industrial trucking companies have estimated the closure is costing them as much as $4,400 a day, while local companies have had to accommodate employees whose commute times have increased by more than an hour in some instances. Extra costs and potential drops in productivity will have an untold negative impact on the local economy. Kentucky and Indiana, meanwhile, may pay for repairs by diverting funds from other infrastructure projects, including a new Ohio River bridge.

Republicans, under the leadership of McConnell, have claimed that America simply can’t afford to pay for roads, bridges, and infrastructure. In reality, however, putting off such investments costs rather than saves money. America’s roads and bridges must be fixed. The only question is how long Republicans will put off such investments, and how costly the economic impact of their intransigence will become.

Take action and tell Congress it’s time to rebuild America.

But does Perry feel the same need to build American infrastructure? President Obama’s jobs package contains much-needed infrastructure investments — including school improvements — yet Perry dismissed it as wasteful spending “guided by his mistaken belief that we can spend our way to prosperity.” “Like the president’s earlier $800 billion stimulus program, this proposal offers little hope for millions of Americans who have lost jobs,” Perry said, ignoring the need for the infrastructure improvements.

Take action and tell Congress it’s time to rebuild America.

Now, Cantor is opposing President Obama’s proposal to spend $30 billion to modernize 35,000 American schools. Reuters has the story:

U.S. House Republican Leader Eric Cantor said on Monday he will not support President Barack Obama’s proposal to renovate U.S. schools as part of the administration’s bill to spur job growth.

He added that Obama should focus instead on cutting federal regulations that he says kill U.S. jobs…

The president’s proposal is a modest effort. The total maintenance and repair backlog at U.S. schools is estimated at $270 billion to $500 billion. While the funding Obama is proposing is fully offset, Cantor voted to build schools in Iraq and Afghanistan with deficit spending.

Construction and building projects generally create about 10,000 jobs per billion spent. At a time of high unemployment, the funding that Cantor opposes would create about 300,000 jobs. Economist Jared Berstein explains that funding to modernize schools is “a smart way to get a lot of people who really need jobs back to work, fix a critical part of our institutional infrastructure, save energy costs, provide kids with a better, healthier learning environment, and do so in way that everyone can see and feel good about each morning when they drop their kids at school.”

Contact your member of Congress and tell them that it is time to rebuild america now. You can do so: HERE.

Sherman Minton Bridge in Louisville, KY

The Sherman Minton Bridge, one of three major bridges spanning the Ohio River between Louisville, KY and southern Indiana, was among the Kentucky bridges listed as deficient. And last night, the Sherman Minton Bridge was closed after further deficiencies, including cracks, were found in a load-bearing part of its structure. The Louisville Courier-Journal reports:

The Sherman Minton Bridge was closed late Friday afternoon and will remain shut down indefinitely after officials discovered cracks in the span.

Will Wingfield, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Transportation, said officials “do not have an estimate” on how long it will take to repair and reopen the bridge, which carries Interstate 64 traffic across the Ohio River.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) ordered the closure of the bridge, as the state of Indiana maintains and operates the bridge. But the 49-year-old bridge serves as a major thoroughfare for Louisville, McConnell’s hometown and Kentucky’s largest city, carrying 50,000 people a day into or out of the city, according to Chuck Wolfe, spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. The state of Kentucky assists in maintenance and evaluation of the bridge’s structure. While the Sherman Minton Bridge is closed, much of its regular daily traffic will be re-routed over another bridge that was already slated to be inspected for structural damage Monday.

The closure came just a day after President Obama renewed his call for Congress to invest in infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy and address the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads, as studies have shown the nation needs $2 trillion in investment just to bring its infrastructure up to date. McConnell criticized Obama’s plan, saying it was “a re-election plan.”

But while McConnell insists that Republicans “agree that we must bring America’s infrastructure up to 21st century standards,” his recent record doesn’t show it. When progressives and Democrats argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act should be geared toward infrastructure, the GOP under McConnell’s leadership fought to focus it on tax cuts. The Senate GOP derailed a 2010 jobs plan focused largely on infrastructure investment, and if McConnell’s post-speech rhetoric is to be believed, he will be at the forefront of the Republican Party’s opposition to this plan too.

This Minnesota bridge was also rated "structurally deficient"

President Obama’s plan to kickstart the economy and put the American people back to work includes investing in the nation’s rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, which, as studies have shown, is in need of as much as $2 trillion in immediate investment just to bring it up to date. In the past, Republicans have agreed that infrastructure improvements are needed, but in the context of economic stimulus and in their effort to remain opposed to anything Obama offers, they have chosen to ignore the nation’s infrastructure and jobs crises. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t mean either crisis will go away.

Republican leadership has continually blocked efforts by Obama and Congressional Democrats to invest in infrastructure improvements, and as a result, bridges and roadways in their states are crumbling. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, about 12 percent of the nation’s bridges are considered “structurally deficient,” the same rating given to the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people. Roughly another 12 percent are considered “functionally obsolete.” In four of the five states represented by Republican congressional leadership, the rate of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges outpaces the national average. ThinkProgress compiled a breakdown of the status of roads and bridges in each of those five states and, where applicable, individual congressional districts:

OHIO: 27 percent of the bridges Speaker John Boehner’s home state of Ohio are either “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete,” while one-fourth of its roads are considered poor or mediocre. At the heart of the Midwest, Ohio’s share of the national highway system has 171 highway bridges that are structurally deficient. 10 of those bridges are located in Boehner’s own district. Indeed, Obama singled out the Brent-Spence bridge connecting Ohio and Kentucky as “one of the busiest trucking routes in North America.” A recent Cincinnati Enquirer investigation into the bridge noted that it “is one of only 15 major interstate bridges in the country labeled by the federal government as ‘functionally obsolete’ for failure to meet safety or traffic flow standards.”

KENTUCKY: More than one-third (34 percent) of the bridges in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state are structurally deficient or obsolete, including the Brent-Spence Bridge. Of those bridges, 108 are located on the national highway system, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Nearly one in five of Kentucky’s roads are in poor or mediocre condition.

VIRGINIA: In House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s home state, 26 percent of bridges are considered structurally deficient or obsolete, 104 of which are on the national highway system. Nearly one in four of the state’s roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition. In Cantor’s congressional district, 11 national highway bridges are considered deficient.

ARIZONA: In Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl’s home state, 12 percent of the bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” Of those in the national highway system, 25 are structurally deficient. Indeed, a recent report found that the poor rural roads and bridges in Arizona, where 21 percent of roads are considered poor or mediocre, have earned the state the eighth highest rural traffic fatality rate in the nation.

CALIFORNIA: Home to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, California is perhaps most in need of infrastructure improvement. Thirty percent of its bridges are “structurally deficient or fundamentally obsolete.” Though a well-traveled state, California has a whopping 976 bridges on its national highways that are structurally deficient; 24 of those bridges are in McCarthy’s district. California ranks 19th in the nation for percentage of rural bridges that are structurally deficient, and two-thirds of its major roads are in poor or mediocre condition.

Even as roads and bridges in their states fall apart, Republicans remain opposed to Obama’s efforts to invest in improvement projects. When progressives and Democrats pushed for more infrastructure spending in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Republicans demanded a bigger emphasis on tax cuts. When House Democrats passed a jobs bill geared toward infrastructure investment in February 2010, Republicans derailed it in the Senate. And unless the GOP undergoes a radical shift in priorities in the next few months, yet another plan that will help solve both America’s infrastructure and jobs crises will die at the hands of Congressional Republicans.

The result, as statistics from these five states show, is that the country continues to watch its infrastructure crumble while leaders in the Republican Party sit idly by, refusing to do anything about it.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D)

New Jersey alone may have suffered billions of dollars in damages. On NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, said the hurricane should act as a wake-up call to policymakers to upgrade the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. “We’re seeing, in the city of Newark, lots of flooding and problems because our infrastructure is getting very aged, and we haven’t had the kind of investment or the resources to put the investment into it to keep our infrastructure strong and safe,” Booker said:

GREGORY: You know, Mayor, I want to ask you something I asked Governor Christie as well, which I think is an important bigger question out of all of this, which is how prepared are we as a country, not just the city of Newark or the state of New Jersey, but as a country, to deal with disasters of any magnitude? On a week when you had Hurricane Irene, on a week when you also had an earthquake that is so rare along the East Coast?

BOOKER: Well, first of all, I’m proud of my president, I’m proud of my governor for both jumping in and being very, very pre-cautious by calling a state of emergency. It’s much better to be prepared for an emergency and not have one than have an emergency and not be prepared. But to your point, I’m very concerned in our country that we have not been investing in infrastructure like we need to. We’re seeing, in the city of Newark, lots of flooding and problems because our infrastructure is getting very aged, and we haven’t had the kind of investment or the resources to put the investment into it to keep our infrastructure strong and safe. And I know this is a problem from around the country. I’ve talked to many mayors. We need to begin to understand that investments in infrastructure is actually going to save us money over the long term. It’s going to keep people safe and it’s actually going to help our economy as well.

Watch it:

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, America’s infrastructure needs a five-year, $2.2 trillion investment in order to be brought into adequate shape. When it comes to flood prevention, the Engineers note that “more than 85% of the nation’s estimated 100,000 miles of levees are locally owned and maintained” and that “the reliability of many of these levees is unknown.”

It would take an investment of more than $100 billion to bring America’s levees up to the proper standard. House Republicans, however, are trying to enact cuts to infrastructure spending, while House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said any federal aid sent to areas affected by the hurricane should be offset with spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. (HT: Politico Live)

Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “the first duty of the sovereign, that of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies, can be performed only by means of a military force.” Today, failing to protect our national security inevitably endangers our economic prosperity by making us vulnerable to global adversaries.

It is clear that President Obama does not agree with Smith’s wisdom. Obama’s policies are jeopardizing not only our national security and economy, but our constitutional sovereignty too.

That is why I have been considering running for President.

It’s the second recent occasion that Bolton has relied on Smith to knock Obama. And both times he has picked out this same line on “protecting the society,” particularly to argue against cutting military spending at the expense of reducing entitlements. That’s because it’s an incredibly narrow selective quote from The Wealth of Nations. Other government duties, as outlined by Smith, don’t really line up with Bolton’s far-right ideology.

Other than providing for defense and a robust justice system, Smith wrote that the duties of the sovereign also include setting up “public institutions and public works” for:

facilitating the commerce of the society, and those for promoting the instruction of the people. The institutions for instruction are of two kinds: those for the education of youth, and those for the instruction of people of all ages.

Smith clearly indicates that other duties of the sovereign include educating the populace — possibly up through the university level — and paying for infrastructure projects that keep commerce strong, “such as good roads, bridges, navigable canals, harbours, etc.”

In short, Smith believed not only that governments should shoulder responsibility for the first duty of defense, but for other public projects as well. And how should governments pay for all of this, according to Smith? Well, with a progressive tax:

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

John Bolton may only care for Smith’s first duty because, as Salon writer Alex Pareene put it, defense budget cuts could “imperil [his] forever war.” But if Bolton insists that Adam Smith is inspiring his presidential run, he’d better clear up his positions on Smith’s other duties before his potential Republican primary opponents start denouncing him as class-warrior tax-and-spend socialist.

The construction industry took a huge hit in 2007 as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble. Construction employment has fallen from its all-time high of 7.7 million in April 2006 to 5.5 million this July, a level not seen since March of 1996. Furthermore, levels have remained relatively stagnant since November 2009 after shedding nearly 2 million jobs in two years.

The July jobs report that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released today, while fairly good in comparison to previous months, showed a gain of only 8,000 construction jobs. These numbers indicate that a substantial investment in infrastructure along the lines of the Works Progress Administration is the right policy decision for politicians to make, especially at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers grades the overall U.S. infrastructure as a “D” and estimates that a total of $2.2 trillion in spending is needed over five years to bring it up to acceptable levels:

Currently however, politics and public policy are only exacerbating the problem. Republicans refused last week to provide a clean extension of Federal Aviation Administration funding over a desire to include an anti-union provision, resulting in the furlough of nearly 70,000 construction workers and the immediate halting of $2.5 billion in airport construction projects. House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL) has presented a bill that would slash funding for the FAA and transportation infrastructure projects, costing more than 560,000 jobs and exacerbating unemployment in the construction industry, which is already at 16.3 percent.

Although a short-term deal to re-fund the FAA has now been struck, it is of little comfort to both the workers who had their lives disrupted and to the economy, which continues to suffer the blows of political intransigence.

As we suffer through severe droughts, more intense rainfall and flooding, and sea level rise along the coast, the nation’s drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure is coming under increasing levels of stress. In the face of these costly challenges, and to help our nation’s water agencies continue delivering safe and uninterrupted water services to the communities that rely upon them, we must begin planning now. That’s why I’ve introduced the Water System Resiliency and Sustainability Act, which will help jump-start this critical local planning and create new jobs updating water infrastructure to meet the significant challenges posed by climate change.

“The funds would be awarded to owners or operators of water systems based on their vulnerability to climate-related risks and the number of users who would benefit from their proposals to manage those risks,” E&E News summarizes. “The legislation would authorize $50 million a year for the matching grant program through 2016.”

Capps, who introduced similar legislation in 2009, worked on the bill with the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, environmental organizations and other stakeholders. The bill has 11 Democratic co-sponsors, and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) is expected to introduce companion legislation in the Senate.

To preserve the promise of civilization, we must start anew.

Twenty years ago, the world agreed that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions needs to be reversed as quickly as possible, or dangerous and potentially irreversible degradation of the global climate system would begin in about twenty years.

Those twenty years have passed, and now the world must mobilize to eliminate global warming pollution and defend humanity against the dangerous climate change that is now happening.

The existing global framework to address the threat of global warming — governmental, academic, scientific, economic, societal — is two decades old. The world’s top climate scientists drove the formation, in 1988, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations. Following the first IPCC climate change assessment report in 1990, representatives of the planet’s governments gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to establish a framework convention for addressing climate change — called, naturally enough, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That framework, ratified by all the world’s governments, including the United States, has guided civilization’s collective effort to address the threat of greenhouse emissions to the present day. As expressed in the UNFCCC:

The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

Despite their best efforts, those committed to achieving the objectives of the convention failed. The 1990 First Assessment Report correctly warned that “irreversible change in the climate” could come by 2000. Permafrost melt, sea level rise, species extinction, glacial retreat and disappearance, and other systemic impacts have transformed our planet for the worse. The degraded climate is now causing the decline of ecosystems, degradation of food production, and economic instability around the globe. Left unchecked, global warming is increasingly likely to solve the emissions problem through the collapse of industrial civilization.

So what can be done?

The necessary elements for defending civilization in a more dangerous, rapidly changing world all exist. Insurance companies are reconfiguring their policies as seas rise and disasters increase. Hedge funds are developing new financial instruments to handle the effects of climate instability. City planners are examining the security of transit and utility systems. Military officials are drawing up new war scenarios. Scientists and entrepreneurs are inventing, refining, and deploying technologies to sustainably power civilization. Activists are putting their freedom on the line to challenge the forces of inaction. But these efforts are haphazard and uncoordinated. They are insufficient to ensure that the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are realized on our polluted planet.

The missing piece, often described euphemistically as “political will,” involves a complete rethinking of the threat of global warming. Most Americans see global warming as a real problem, but one that is distant in time and space: that will only affect their children or grandchildren, one that will affect far reaches of the planet first and foremost. That misunderstanding is utterly natural, since that is the presumption of the existing framework, reinforced by the rhetoric and actions of political leaders like President Barack Obama. The greatest culpability, of course, lies in the immoral acts of powerful polluters and their allies to deny the threat entirely.

The new climate framework needs to be built on the following principles:

– Humanity is responsible for climate disasters.

– Climate change is not only a future threat but an active enemy to societal progress.

– All investments must take into account the reality of increasing uncertainty and risk as the climate system becomes more unstable.

– All existing infrastructures — physical, legal, economic, political, cultural — need to be re-examined for resilience in our changing world.

ThinkProgress Green and Climate Progress will be reporting on the efforts of this generation of humanity, and of the great democratic experiment of the United States of America, to build this new framework.

The levee’s failure is a tragic reminder of the sorry state of America’s infrastructure. This particular levee failed a federal inspection in 2008, receiving an “unacceptable” rating from the U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers. In the U.S. patchwork levee system, many local communities are responsible for levee upkeep, and this particular community couldn’t afford the cost.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, nearly ten percent of the levees in the country are expected to fail during a flood event. The Civil Corps. of Engineers gave the U.S. levee system a D- grade in 2009, and estimated that it would take a $50 billion investment to get those levees into adequate shape:

During the past 50 years there has been tremendous development on lands protected by levees. Coupled with the fact that many levees have not been well maintained, this burgeoning growth has put people and infrastructure at risk—the perceived safety provided by levees has inadvertently increased flood risks by attracting development to the floodplain. Continued population growth and economic development behind levees is considered by many to be the dominant factor in the national flood risk equation, outpacing the effects of increased chance of flood occurrence and the degradation of levee condition.

Projected federal spending on levees in the next five years is expected to be just $1.13 billion, leaving a $48.87 billion shortfall in needed funding. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “there are 881 counties — or 28 percent of all counties in the United States — that contain levees or other kinds of flood control and protection systems.” More than half of the U.S. population resides in those counties.

Overall, the U.S. has about $2.2 trillion in unaddressed infrastructure needs. The Congressional Progressive Caucus budget that was released earlier this month includes $30 billion “as start-up costs for a national infrastructure bank that would leverage private financing to help rebuild America’s public capital stock,” and budgets for $1.2 trillion in public investment over the next five years.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.