Rebuilding & Renewing America

America faces a host of challenges in the coming century, all of which will have profound impacts on the nation’s future growth and development. Global economic restructuring, rising fuel and household costs, climate change, deteriorating infrastructure, all require strategies to maximize the nation’s continued prosperity, opportunity and quality of life.

In the face of these challenges, though, America is flying blind. No national strategy exists to build and manage the infrastructure systems needed to sustain inclusive economic growth and our competitive position in the global economy, and to secure a healthy environment for our children and grandchildren.

Our global competitors are now racing ahead to build the infrastructure to ensure their full participation in a 21st century economy. While America spends about 2.4 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on infrastructure, China and India are spending 9 percent and 4.6 percent of their GDPs, respectively.1 Every American lives with the consequences of decades of underinvestment, including congested and deteriorating highways, unsafe bridges, inadequate transit and inter-city rail systems, delayed flights and bottle-necked seaports. Delayed shipments and the costs of congestion place every business in the country at a disadvantage compared with overseas competitors.

This was not always the case. The growth of this nation is due in part to far-sighted investments that built the nation’s canals, railroads, power generation projects, bridges and roads, and protected the nation’s environmental heritage, including its forests, wetlands, coastlines, parks, drinking water and clean air. America has a history of national plans that shaped development: the Gallatin Plan in 1808; Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation plans in 1908; and the work of the New Deal-era National Resources Planning Board, which led to the Interstate System in 1956. It’s time to do it again.

This forum is dedicated to advancing a new vision for the future of America’s infrastructure. Just as the Interstate Highway system provided a road map for the country’s growth fifty years ago, we now need a similarly ambitious vision, but one that responds to the challenge of increased foreign competition while cutting greenhouse gases and reducing our over-reliance on imported oil. The United States continues to have great potential to compete and lead in the 1 According to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, since the mid-1980s, U.S. public spending on infrastructure as a share of GDP ranges from 2.3 to 2.5 percent. 21st century economy because of its vast human, natural, and technological resources, but to do so effectively and efficiently, it must respond to four central challenges.

The Challenges We Face

• Global Competitiveness: There has been an outpouring of studies in the past several years documenting the challenges facing the United States as an economic, cultural, moral, and political world leader in the 21st century. For all their differences, three critical themes emerge. First, the United States as a mature industrial society and leader of the post-WWII free world is losing its competitive edge in the global economy. Second, the vast infrastructure systems created throughout the 20th century are at the end of their useful life, require major reconstruction or are overcrowded and congested, undercutting America’s ability to compete in both its traditional fields of dominance and in emerging arenas of importance. Third, recognition of the problem is not the challenge; rather it is the lack of imagination, creativity, and most of all, political will and leadership to re-think the fundamental principles and institutional design of our policy making and governing processes of the nation. To do so will require harnessing the resources and capacities of both the public and private sectors to fashion 21st century strategies for sustained and sustainable growth.
• Infrastructure: Over the past two centuries we built systems of transportation, water supply and protection, and energy production and transmission that supported our growth and were the envy of the world. Recently we have not created the new capacity needed to underpin the next generation of economic development, let alone maintain what we have built. An astonishing series of bridge collapses and levee failures have underscored America’s dangerous infrastructure deficit, estimated by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) at $1.6 trillion. In the nation’s transportation system alone, the recent National Surface Transportation Commission estimated that $225 billion a year is needed over 50 years to bring the transportation to system to a good repair and make need improvements for economic growth. From transportation to water and energy systems, we need investment and innovation to develop a more sustainable framework to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, create capacity for economic growth, and make better use of our natural resources.
• Fairness and Opportunity: The global economic transformation is deepening economic and social stratification as working- and middle-families find it increasingly difficult to cover rapidly rising transportation, housing and fuel expenses. At the regional level, access to economic opportunity is often segmented by geography. In many places, the best jobs have moved out from central cities, accessible only by car, while poverty remains concentrated in inner cities and inner suburbs. At the national level, the transformation is also leaving vast regions of the nation lagging in job growth and income levels. Predominantly manufacturing and resource-based economies, including the older industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest and rural farming communities in the Great Plains and Deep South, as a result of decades of declining population and income.
• Climate Change and Energy Security: With the price of oil reaching a new high of $120 a barrel, it is safe to say the era of cheap gasoline has passed. Meanwhile, the evidence of human impact on global climate change is becoming increasingly evident and the likely impacts will significantly change our lives. Climate change will impose huge costs on local communities across America, affecting agriculture, tourism, insurance rates, safety, and homeowners’ investments. It will have a significant impact on hydrological cycles, producing more frequent droughts and flooding, and other effects. At the national and global scale, climate change will cause disproportionate impacts on developing countries including vulnerable coastal regions in the Global South, contributing to competition for resources and instability in already volatile regions. The IPCC estimates that the United States must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 60 – 80 percent of current levels by 2050 to avert the worst impacts of climate change, with every year of delay driving up the cost of making change.

In face of these challenges, American population is anticipated to grow rapidly. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, from 2000 – 2050, America will grow by about 130 million additional people—the same number that was added from 1950 – 2000, during which time America’s GDP Rebuilding and Renewing America: Toward a 21st Century Infrastructure Investment Plan May 9, 2008 5 increased almost six fold. By making new investments in the physical fabric of the nation we can create needed capacity for growth, in the same way that the Interstate Highway System fueled two generations of development in the last half of the 20th century, and a system of canals, roads and railroads supported growth in the nation’s first 150 years. The challenge for our generation of Americans is to make these investments in the nation’s physical infrastructure, including transportation and energy infrastructure, the natural environment and water resources, and the next generation of commercial, residential and government buildings. With equally bold strategies for investing in people skills, these investments will provide the foundation for a new generation of more fair and sustainable development.

For additional information on the America 2050 project, visit the archived America 2050 website.