US Infrastructure: How Trump Could Rebuild America - by Lenny Mendonca & Laura Tyson

In the United States today, with partisan polarization at record levels, there is still at least one policy goal on which there is broad consensus, not only among Republicans and Democrats, but also among business and labor leaders, states and cities, and ordinary citizens: infrastructure.

The US has been short-changing infrastructure for years. Historically, federal, state, and local governments have together invested about 2.5% of GDP in non-defense infrastructure assets. But, over the last 35 years, federal investment as a share of GDP has dropped by more than half.

For a long time, state and local governments were able to cover the shortfall, increasing their contribution to three quarters of total spending. But when the Great Recession hit, states and cities were forced to slash their budgets. As a result, in the second quarter of this year, total public expenditure on infrastructure fell to an estimated 1.4% of GDP, the lowest share on record.

This is all the more worrying, given the already-poor state of US infrastructure, which earned a grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2017 quadrennial report. Almost 20% of US highways are in disrepair. The costs and consequences of deferred maintenance are apparent everywhere, and almost every city and state has its horror stories: dysfunctional subways in New York City, lead-contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan, the near-collapse of a major dam in Oroville, California.

The report estimates that restoring US infrastructure to “a state of good repair” would cost $4.6 trillion between 2016 and 2025. That is $2.1 trillion more than has been committed so far. Developing new funding sources for infrastructure investment is therefore critical.

Read more: How Trump Could Rebuild America by Lenny Mendonca & Laura Tyson - Project Syndicate

US Infrastructure: Decaying infrastructure taking a toll on America

America's infrastructure is in a state of crisis. Roads and train lines are old, dangerous and cost the country billions of dollars in economic growth. Trump wants to repair damages but he is at the mercy of investors.

The summer of hell began for New Yorkers last Monday. Beginning at four o'clock in the afternoon people hurried home from work, clogging midtown Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station.

 Over 600,000 people trek to Manhattan daily from faraway places like New Jersey and Long Island, entering the city via Penn Station. More people transit through Penn Station than all three of New York's airports: JFK, LaGuardia and Newark. Yet on Monday many tracks were shut down for the summer so the city can begin tackling urgently needed repairs.

During his campaign, Trump promised trillions of dollars to tackle this issue. Yet a look at the budget says otherwise: The government will spend only $200 billion on the infrastructure package. The remaining $800 billion must come from states and municipalities - no major problem for wealthy states. But the rural areas remain in disrepair.

Decaying infrastructure taking a toll on America | Business | DW | 17.07.2017

EU Security A Complete Mess : No Organization - No "Chiefs" - No "Indians" - and extremely poor coordination

EU Security  Coordination In Poor Shape

Belgian authorities actually had accurate advance warnings that terrorists planned to launch attacks at the Brussels airport and subway — yet failed to act, according to several reports.

Despite the knowledge, the intelligence and security apparatus in Brussels — home to most of the European Union agencies — was limited and ill-prepared to handle the alert,

In other developments Wednesday, March 23, Turkey’s prime minister said his country last year arrested one of the Brussels attackers and deported him to the Netherlands, but Belgium ignored warnings that he was a militant.

“One of the Brussels attackers was detained in Gaziantep (in southern Turkey (close to the Syrian border) and then deported” to the Netherlands, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters about Ibrahim El Bakraoui.

Turkey said it warned both Belgium and the Netherlands that Ibrahim was a “foreign terrorist fighter.”

Dutch authorities later allowed him to go free because Belgian authorities could not establish any ties to terrorism, an official in the Turkish president’s office said.

Turkey formally notified Belgium of the 29-year-old Belgian national’s deportation on July 14, 2015.

The announcement came after authorities said they discovered a cache of explosives in a house and a farewell note from an airport suicide bomber — one of two brothers identified in the attacks.

The brothers were identified as Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, both of whom had extensive criminal records but had not been on watch lists as potential terror threats.

What Europe does not have is any cross-national agency with the power to carry out its own investigation and make its own arrests.

This means that cross-border policing in the European Union has big holes. It depends heavily on informal cooperation rather than formal institutions with independent authority.

Sometimes this works reasonably well. Sometimes this works particularly badly. Belgium is a notorious problem case, because its policing arrangements are heavily localized.

In the past, many Belgian policing forces have had difficulty cooperating with each other, let alone with other European forces.

Europe has to put some serious thought into setting up a "Pan European Security Network" to coordinate, trace, find, capture and if need be, eliminate security threats to its citizens. This has to happen pretty quickly.

Insure-Digest