Time for a new infrastructure growth initiative

Forty-three years ago this month, Congress signaled America's retreat from economic and transportation leadership. Amid tense debate, the solons in both House and Senate killed funding for a next-generation commercial airliner, the Boeing 2707 Supersonic Transport (SST).

The narrow votes against the high-tech effort shocked the industry. Not only had the SST earned the support of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, but its Seattle manufacturer had 122 orders for the 234-passenger plane from 26 airlines.

But a Democratic Congress couldn't see the upside of an infrastructure initiative that would have boosted America's morale, leadership, and global standing by transforming transcontinental and international travel. Or value preserving 60,000 family-wage jobs in the struggling aviation sector, which prompted Gerald Ford, the normally even-tempered Republican minority leader, to deliver an animated appeal for the SST during the House floor debate.

The grounding of the Boeing 2707 marked a tipping point: It reversed more than a century of nation-building that turned the budding United States into the world's preeminent superpower. No longer would Uncle Sam embrace the imperative of securing a robust defense-industrial-infrastructure foundation in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton's "American school" of economics, Henry Clay's "American System," and Abraham Lincoln's transcontinental railroad.

Indeed, not since Eisenhower's building of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and JFK's awe-inspiring Apollo moon shot, has Congress or any president successfully proposed and executed a cutting-edge infrastructure or nation-building effort - notwithstanding Ronald Reagan's relatively small-scale, nickel-a-gallon gas-tax hike for highway expansion and repairs.

After decades of drift and decay, it's time to reexamine America's departure from a proven pattern of economic development - as there's no route to national strength and prosperity without mega-technological projects like the SST.

The opposition to domestic nation-building came from new forces in U.S. politics, beginning with the environmentalists. Although they had just started flexing their muscles in knocking down the Boeing jetliner, the modern-day Malthusians were quickly erecting a phalanx of federal laws, regulations, and court rulings that, while admirably cleaning up our air and water, overreached to put the kibosh on critical development needs.

For example, large-scale projects, public and private, have been blocked by a variety of early-1970s legislation, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

The NEPA was particularly ominous. Without making any substantive contribution to environmental standards, this legislation created a procedural nightmare, weaving a massive web of lengthy, no-win environmental reviews and red tape that have tied up projects for years. NEPA also raised up a well-heeled adversarial class - an entire industry of litigators and antigrowth agitators - to vigorously battle any public-works project.

The impact has been profound: No state, region, or metropolitan area has been spared environmentalist ploys blocking construction of a needed highway or bridge. The antigrowth forces have also curtailed a nationwide energy renaissance by blocking oil exploration in a tiny section of the remote Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and, more recently, the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Yet the greens on the left found support on the right, as a libertarian mind-set took root in the Republican Party during the same time. This free-market overreaction to the "stagflation" of the 1970s, spearheaded intellectually by Milton Friedman, focused on tax and spending cuts. Infrastructure commitments became ripe targets, and were derided as "pork barrel" funding for unionized blue-collar workers and entrenched political machines.

So the libertarians proposed "starving the beast" of Big Government and privatizing public works, presuming that the market could better decide if we need a new plane or port. These Republicans were skeptical, too, of the national-security-based priorities of Eisenhower and his interstates and Nixon's SST. They thus broke faith with the Federalists of Hamilton, the Whigs of Clay, and the Republicans of Lincoln, all of whom pressed for "internal improvements" as the underpinning of robust markets.

This unintended collusion between liberals and libertarians reaped a destructive whirlwind throughout Middle America, including former industrial powerhouses like Philadelphia. By scrimping on infrastructure and killing innovative projects, the country has marginalized its manufacturing sector, including the 65 percent of the U.S. workforce without college degrees, whose livelihoods largely depend upon making material things and literally building America.

But the ultimate price hasn't been paid by the middle class but rather the nation as a whole, as four decades of retrenchment have left the United States economically, politically, militarily, strategically, and socially vulnerable.

Now more than ever, it's time to reverse course, power up, and rebuild America in the tradition of great nation-builders of the past, including Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Eisenhower, JFK, and Reagan. That vision demands bold leadership in the White House and new voices in Congress to sound the charge and move America forward.