Renewal With Alternative Infrastructure

Politicians often talk about infrastructure renewal in their campaign rhetoric. They say that the national infrastructure is in decay and need of repairs. It is true that many of the vast number of Herbert Hoover era public works are somewhat aged and that water pipes and electrical systems may be of venerable status while the Eisenhower interstate system was founded more than a half century ago. Even so the infrastructure most in need of renewal or replacement is the ideas that politicians have about national infrastructure.

Politicians generally want to just throw money at somewhat creaky systems and renew it as if it were a Model T that needed rusty fender and spring replacements. Instead they should be thinking about new transportation forms that don't need ancient infrastructure paradigms at all. Infrastructure is a consequence of past economic development. New infrastructure should replace old infrastructure that supports new economic development.

It would be possible to produce much more national electricity off the present grid with hydrogen fuel cells in home and neighborhood. It would also be possible to relocate much manufacturing to the United States with 3-D printers of a somewhat industrial scale. What would be useful to stimulate development of new ideas would be education and coordination of small teams of materials designers able to encode pat3entable ideas in materials and computer coding designers able to encode the product material design in digitalized data code ready for printing. Ideas made in America could be produced in America and around the world without need for material import or export.

With new electrical and material production infrastructure it would also be useful to generate new ideas for transportation infrastructure that aren't based upon concrete or asphalt highways and fossil fuel internal combustion platform networks. Faster, cheaper electro-magnetic linear accelerator platforms under and above ground could let existing road be torn up and made into new wildlife corridor infrastructure for bioethical continuity.

Sewage infrastructure might be replaced with some sort of particle beam disintegrator facilities of sludge, or microwave or heat incineration of biowaste in newer infrastructure reducing the requirement for extensive wet transport of piss and poop.

It is perhaps only one of the most endangered national infrastructures; water, that would require not only renewal of existing infrastructure but increased protection extending to renewal of natural watershed infrastructure as well as water storage and transport infrastructure above and below ground.

It would be desirable if politicians contemplating national infrastructure renewal considered ecological economic upgrades as well, if they could get a grasp of what ecological economics are academically speaking. As it is some of the few politicians considering the renewal of democracy infrastructure with a reduction of the corrupting vast divide between the average annual earnings of rich and poor may talk about investing in infrastructure renewal to create jobs but what they really mean is to through hundreds of billions down into the money pit of ancient infrastructure and ancient economic practices that today tend to support globalism more than American national economic interests..

With a Presidential primary election campaign year ahead one must wonder if either major party has anyone with good ideas or any sort of technical economic competence planning to run. Many Republicans want to be another Ronald Reagan-yet what year is this0?

Democrats seem rather daft an interested mainly in homosexuality, drugs and illegal alien amnesty to get more cheap labor and votes. Of course President Obama did consistently stimulate Syrian conflict with a demand that the lawfully elected President quit-and that gave the green light to the rise of ISIS, so maybe they can accomplish things other than giving zero interest loans to Wall Street.

That raises the final point here; is the economy really healthy? What happens if Republicans or Democrats shut down the Fed Reserve free money printing for Wall Street? Is Wall Street so badly evolved in relation to natural resources that it has no ability to exist on its own? Tune in to the next episode of decaying national infrastructure to find out.