From the Alliance for Improving America’s Infrastructure:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — As the Democrat and Republican Conventions get underway, the Alliance for Improving America’s Infrastructure is calling on Senators Barack Obama and John McCain as well as Members of Congress to support a new economic stimulus package to provide funding for the country’s crumbling highways, bridges and transportation systems, potentially creating 750,000 jobs throughout the country within 90 days.

“Finding solutions to America’s crumbling infrastructure is an issue that Senators Obama and McCain and Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle should embrace,” said National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler. “There are 18 billion dollars in infrastructure projects
across the nation that are ready to go - not ‘roads to nowhere,’ but projects that have been studied at length and validated beyond question. We must join together to find solutions to this crisis - and creating jobs by funding the 3,000 highway and transportation projects that are ready to begin immediately is a good place to start.”

The Alliance’s website is GetAmericaMoving.com.

Infrastructure, legal reform and defending nation’s domestic security are all top issues facing the United States today, and this week on “America’s Business with Mike Hambrick,” we hear from prominent leaders working to reinforce these pillars of our economy.

Ed Fox, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, brings us up to date on the agency’s activities, with an emphasis on keeping business owners and operators aware of the threats they face.

Former Texas Congressman Max Sandlin talks about the work of the NAM-founded Alliance for Improving America’s Infrastructure to strengthen the country’s roads, bridges, rails, harbors, and airports - the bricks and mortar of our advanced industrial economy. Sandlin co-chairs the alliance.

Providing the private-sector perspective is Ronald DeFeo, chairman and CEO of the Terex Corporation, the global diversified manufacturer, best known for its construction equipment. Earlier this year, DeFeo gathered business, labor and political leaders from around the country for a national summit to discuss strategies for addressing infrastructure needs.

Scott Cohn of CNBC returns to “America’s Business” with the second annual report on the network’s “Top States for Business” rankings. Good job, Texas!

And NAM Senior Vice President Jay Timmons surveys the political scene with an eye on legal issues and how trial lawyers’ are expanding the grounds on which to sue - in the process, taking millions of dollars away that business could better spend hiring and paying employees.

In our regular segments, Renee Giachino of American Justice Partnership reports the latest on tort reform and the NAM’s Hank Cox recalls “The Way It Was.” And our program will close with “The Last Word” from the National Association of Manufacturers President Gov. John Engler.

For more about “America’s Business with Mike Hambrick” and to listen to the program online, please click here.  And for video highlights and more, check out www.americasbusiness.org.

Even before today’s fires and power outages disrupted downtown D.C., it had been a rough week for transportation infrastructure in the area. Commuting by the Metro’s Orange line was a disaster because of a derailment — and Metro officials bungled the back-up plans for shuttle buses, completely mishandling communications — even as high fuel prices push riders onto mass transit. And the MARC trains were the usual unreliable selves.

Coincidently, this David Post diary on the indignities of infrastructure at Volokh.com was already getting some attention (via Instapundit):

Really, our public infrastructure – our public life – is in the process of deteriorating, and we don’t seem to be able to summon up the energy required to do anything about it. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I work in Philadelphia, probably the world capital of “what can you do? it’s just the way it is” – the public transportation system in Philadelphia is a grotesque monstrosity, filthy, noisy, and monumentally unpleasant, and the general feeling seems to be that it would be a miracle if we could find some way just to keep it from getting any worse – so maybe I’m oversensitive to the problem. But if I had had a guest with me from overseas on this trip, I would have been appalled and embarrassed by the state of decay into which we, collectively, have allowed things to fall.

Much of America’s transportation infrastructure is a half-century old; the Interstate Highway System was inaugurated in 1956 (after decades of planning).

But the planning and much of the construction took place before the Great Society, before Medicare, before Medicaid, before welfare, before Food Stamps, before the Conservation Reserve Program, before the Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program, before the Community Development Block Grant Program, before the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, leafy spurge management grants, before HUD, the EPA, the Department of Education, etc., etc., etc….that is, before the explosion of federal spending and programs that now draw dollars that might have been spent on infrastructure.

Two thoughts (and we had time to mull things over on the hour long bus ride home today):

• It’s a choice the American people have made and are now living with.
• You can see why private financing — e.g. toll roads and public-private partnerships — is increasingly turned to pay for infrastructure.

In the meantime, here’s the website for the NAM-founded Alliance for Improving America’s Infrastructure, GetAmericaMoving.com.