Back to Work - Bill Clinton [43]
Americans lost $4.8 billion in earnings and 3.9 billion gallons in wasted gas while stranded in traffic last year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. The American Society of Civil Engineers says travel delays and substandard infrastructure (like potholes) cost Americans almost $130 billion a year. That doesn’t count the economic losses of lower productivity, missed export opportunities at ports and airports, or the household costs and environmental damage created in populous areas of America where people must rely on septic tanks because there are no municipal sewage systems, or heat their homes with home heating oil rather than natural gas or electricity.
Most people also may not know that the United States spends only 1.7 percent of GDP on infrastructure, compared with 4 percent for Canada or 9 percent for China, which is trying to catch up. A big reason for this is our reluctance to raise the gas tax. That’s understandable, because Americans drive a lot and their budgets are tight; buying gasoline consumes more than 10 percent of the income of many lower-income Americans. But millions of Americans pay even more in the cost of time and gas wasted in traffic jams, not to mention the costs of car repairs and lost business opportunities.
Click here to view a larger image. (Illustration credit 5.7)
The second chart ranks nations on the quality of their broadband connections, based on the percentage of households with access, the speed of the connections, and costs. The United States ranks fifteenth out of the thirty nations studied by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, behind all our wealthy competitors except Germany. On the speed measure alone, we rank even lower, at twenty-eighth, according to a 2009 survey by Speed Matters. As every American knows, if only the percentage of cell phone calls interrupted by loss of the connection were measured, we’d rank even lower.
What most Americans don’t know is that the average download speed of number-one-ranked South Korea’s broadband connections is four times faster than ours, because the Korean government made rapid, efficient broadband a priority. The stimulus bill provided $7.2 billion to bring high-speed Internet connections to rural areas. It will help, but it will cost more than that to move the United States into the top rank of nations. Does it matter?
It matters a lot, because speed determines the possibilities for using the Internet to create jobs and maximize innovations in telemedicine, education, energy conservation, user-friendly government services, and other areas.
WELL, ENOUGH OF THE BAD NEWS. Let’s look at America’s strengths. America still has by far the world’s largest economy. Our per capita income is still high. According to the World Bank, it ranks sixth among the world’s larger economies, tied with Finland and behind Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The CIA’s World Factbook, which measures GDP per capita, ranks the United States higher, behind only Norway and Singapore. So, in spite of our high degree of income inequality, we’re still doing pretty well. On overall competitiveness, the latest World Economic Forum report ranks the United States fifth, highest of any large economy, behind Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, and Finland, just ahead of Germany, followed by the Netherlands and Denmark.
Thanks in large measure to our openness to immigrants, we’re still a relatively young country. The median age of our already wealthy competitors is higher than ours, so in the future, if we can restore economic growth and slow down the rise in health-care costs, we should have a better ratio of workers to retirees and more opportunities to create more broadly