In a few days time, I will get in my car and drive eight hours home to Massachusetts; during the trip, I’ll pass through eight states and the District of Columbia and over several bridges of varying expanses. Many of these roads and bridges are close to fifty years old and desperately in need of investments for upgrades. In a 2013 report, “America’s Infrastructure,” The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our national infrastructure a D+ – hardly sufficient.
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law. It created a 41,000 mile national system of interstate highways, the longest of which is Interstate 90, which connects Seattle, Washington with Boston, Massachusetts. The highway act allocated $26 billion to pay for the roads. Ninety percent of the construction costs were to be paid for by the federal government, using money from a 3-cent per gallon gas tax that went into a designated Highway Trust Fund. Today, this fund is facing a $170 billion structural funding gap caused by a combination of factors: better fuel efficiency standards, a decrease in how many miles Americans are driving, and the eroding value of the gas tax revenue, which was last raised in 1993.
We must be willing, as a country, to provide greater investments if we want our national infrastructure to endure and provide economic benefits into the 21st century. The Federal Highway Administration (FHA) estimates we would need to spend $20.8 billion annually, in contrast to current annual spending of $12.8 billion, to eliminate the backlog of work on U.S. bridges by 2028. The FHA also estimates that $170 billion in capital investments is needed annually to improve the conditions and performances of our federal highways.
The Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network’s “Blueprint for Millennial America” highlights a Millennial preference for strengthening America’s infrastructure to avoid a future “infrastructure deficit” that stifles economic growth. In recent years, Congress has been allocating general tax revenue to the Highway Trust Fund to cover the year-to-year gap, a poor long-term approach to closing the shortfall, never mind planning for additional investments.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently published a paper, “Trust or Bust: Fixing the Federal Highway Fund,” exploring the various ways to close the $170 billion deficit in the fund. It is no surprise that the main options include raising additional revenue or reducing federal spending. Congress could decide to permanently funnel additional general funds to highway investment and compensate by reducing funding to other areas, such as the Department of Defense, an entity that receives 27 cents of every federal tax dollar. Or, we could raise the gas tax and gradually, over time, to bring it back in line with today’s costs of maintaining our roads.
Millennials are an interconnected generation, and travel and mobility are important to us. Each year that the infrastructure funding gap goes unaddressed will increase the future burden our generation will bear to undertake simple activities like getting goods to market, or driving home for the holidays. Millennials want to see government do its job, an essential part of which is to coordinate revenues towards areas of national concern. We are tired of short-sighted perspectives.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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