Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood appeared on Tuesday’s edition of Hardball to urge Congress to invest in repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure.
“Everybody has a bridge in their district that’s not safe,” he told Hardball host Chris Matthews.
A 2009 report by the Associated Press said that more than 150,000 bridges nationwide had been labelled “deficient or obsolete.” Of those, only 1,286 had been marked to receive stimulus money for repairs. According to the group Transportation for America, there are now nearly 600,000 structurally deficient bridges in the United States, or one out of every nine bridges in the entire country.
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who also appeared on the show, co-sponsored a bill in the Senate that would invest more money in transportation infrastructure. Currently, a conference committee is trying to reconcile it with a similar bill passed through the House. According to another Transportation for America report, cited by Chris Matthews on the show, Boxer’s bill would create three million jobs, while the House bill would cut 500,000. Want more Lean Forward? Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy analyst, researcher, writer, and editor. His byline has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, and The Nation. He writes the newsletter Public Comment, which can be found at publiccomment.blog. Recommended
