Fix our infrastructure

Elizabeth Drew has an excellent article about our inability or unwillingness to maintain our infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives it a grade of D+. Some excerpts from the article:

The water pipes underneath the White House are said to still be made of wood, as are some others in the nation’s capital and some cities across the country. 
We admire Japan’s and France’s “bullet trains” that get people to their destination with remarkable efficiency, but many other nations have them as well, including Russia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.
The ASCE says that the estimated need of support for America’s infrastructure by 2020 is $3.6 trillion. Total spending at current levels is estimated by the ASCE to be $253 billion annually and estimated spending between 2013 and 2020, before passage of the highway bill, is estimated at $2 trillion, leaving us $1.6 trillion short.
The ASCE’s 2013 report card said that one in nine bridges was structurally deficient; that as of 2013 the average age of the nation’s 607,380 bridges was forty-two years, while the Federal Highway Administration estimates that “more than 30 percent of existing bridges have exceeded their fifty-year design life.” According to the ASCE, to have safe bridges by 2028, the US needs to invest $20.5 billion per year, but current spending annually on bridges is $12.8 billion.
Inland waterways, which get little attention, are, the ASCE says, “the hidden backbone of our freight network,” carrying “the equivalent of about 51 million truck trips each year.” But the waterways haven’t been updated since the 1950s and because half of the locks, according to the ASCE, are over fifty years old, barges have to be stopped for hours each day, “preventing goods from getting to market and driving up costs.”
32 percent of America’s major roads were “in poor or mediocre condition.
a backlog of nearly $78 billion in maintaining mass transit.
the level of federal investment in fixing the aging electrical grid and the pipelines for distributing energy was leading to an increasing number of power failures and interruptions.
the annual cost of rust to the country at more than $400 billion, or 3 percent of GNP.

The gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, when it was set at 18.4 cents per gallon—and wasn’t indexed for inflation. Had inflation been taken into account, the gas tax would now be 30.1 cents per gallon—almost twice what it is now. When the tax was first imposed the price of gasoline was around $1.00 per gallon.

Congress raids the funds held by the Federal Reserve system in case of an emergency need for liquidity in the economy, or to rescue a bank—it’s referred to as the Fed’s “rainy day fund.