The Fall This Summer

From The New York Times:

The numbers were awful. The numbers are awful. Just last week the Congressional Budget Office predicted that unemployment would stay above 8 percent until at least 2014. It has been almost consistently above 9 percent for more than two years now. The budget office also projected a $1.3 trillion budget deficit for 2011 and a growth in G.D.P. of just 2.3 percent.

That’s a pittance in comparison with growth in Brazil, Russia, India or China, known in aggregate as BRIC. I mention the acronym because I heard it constantly this summer. “The BRIC countries are coming on strong.” “You should invest in one of the BRIC indexes.” There was a fascination with economies that were surging because ours so emphatically wasn’t, and they were a rebuke to it. America the sluggish. America the envious.

America the broken. A bipartisan group called Building America’s Future released a report this summer, “Falling Apart and Falling Behind,” that presented a staggering compendium of our transportation woes. It also noted that between 2005 and 2010, the country plummeted from No. 1 to No. 15 in the world in terms of the economic competitiveness of our infrastructure.

So are we hastening to catch up? Hardly.

“The biggest crime in the stimulus package was that infrastructure money should have been tripled or quadrupled,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, one of the leaders of Building America’s Future, told me during a recent telephone conversation. He was reflecting on the two-year period, before the 2010 midterm elections, when the president had both the political capital and Congressional calculus for real action, and he sounded depressed.

“We should be talking about high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor and along the California coastline,” said Mr. Rendell, a Democrat. “We should be talking about big things.”