Crumbling American Pie

The Crumbling American Pie

Charles C. Corbett

TUI University

The Crumbling American Pie

There once was a time when the United States represented the land of prosperity and wealth. The United States was the envy of the global world and everyone hoped to hold a slice of the “American Pie”. The United States remains a leader in the world economy and the greatest nation on Earth but America now faces many challenges that will remain potentially devastating should proper actions not be taken. One of America’s greatest challenges over the two decades will be repair or modernization of key infrastructure. This paper will discuss the potential effects of the deteriorating infrastructure within the United States and more specifically how this crumbling of bridges, highways, and railways will significantly affect supply distribution and the United States economy as a whole if actions are not taken to restore, repair, and modernize existing infrastructure.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is defined as infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, and also the distribution of finished products to markets, as well as basic social services such as schools and hospitals; for example, roads enable the transport of raw materials to a factory. ("Infrastructure," n.d.). In other words, infrastructure is the backbone or the skeletal system of our economy. This analogy proposes that the stronger these bones then the stronger the economy. A few key components of infrastructure are roads, bridges, railroads, and waterways to name a few.

Bridges

Reports indicate that 1 in every 4 bridges is either structurally deficient or in need of repair. There are over 600,000 bridges on the nation's roadways, of which one in four is deficient in some sense. Data indicate that the total number of deficient bridges has decreased over the past 12 years, even as the total number of bridges has increased, because of a reduction in the number of...