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INFRASTRUCTURE. Now there's the stickler! The Forbes Magazine estimate of a $1.3 trillion infrastructure requirement is probably $7 trillion off the mark, because the Executive Intelligence Review estimate of America's infrastructure deficit is around $8 trillion. EIR discusses more than just roads and bridges. Their estimate includes harbors, railroad mileage, highways and bridges (already mentioned), electrical power production, water purification and distribution, land management; then there's the so-called social infrastructure which includes health-care delivery and education. For the past thirty-five years Americans have been looting the infrastructure built-up during the '50s and '60s, as well as destroying the machine-tool principle required by a healthy, modern economy; essentially a cancerous/cannibalistic feeding frenzy. Executive Intelligence Review calls this orgy of self-inflicted wounding "primitive accumulation". In order to find our way out of the current "pickle" we're in, we must toss the "IMF/World Bank/floating-exchange-rate/America-as-importer-to-the-world" scheme into the rubbish bin of history, never again to be repeated. For a truly American System of economics to take its place, Americans must disengage themselves from the Five Poisons which afflict today's economy: (1)Privatization, (2)Outsourcing, (3)De-regulation, (4)Free trade, and (5)Globalization. America's economy is in dire need of exchange controls (i.e., a New Bretton Woods agreement with fixed-exchange-rates among the currencies of sovereign nation-states), capital controls, credit controls and trade protectionism. Congress must reassert its Constitutional mandate to issue and control money. So much for Political Economy. Now PHYSICAL ECONOMICS IS THE SACRED SCIENCE OF THE ABUNDANT LIFE! It concerns itself with the ability of mankind (womankind included) to increase his power over nature as expressed in per capita and per square kilometer terms. One might write an entire encyclopedia about physical economics!

"The Forbes Magazine estimate of a $1.3 trillion infrastructure requirement is probably $7 trillion off the mark, because the Executive Intelligence Review estimate of America's infrastructure deficit is around $8 trillion."

That Lyndon LaRouche stuff ain't gonna fly here. I mostly like four of your so-called "Five Poisons". (I'll only agree about globalism - it's deadly poison.)

$1.3 trillion may be a little low, but $8 trillion is way too high. It would be more efficent to concentrate capital investment on our communications infrastructure and spend less in other areas.