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ezbee:Who would have known Infrastructure could be so difficult.
I've mentioned this before about, oh, 3,000 messages ago, but to see the real state of a country's economy and finances, look at its infrastructure, not the imaginary figures made up by the stock market. The first thing that gets cut when money's tight is maintenance of infrastructure. The US has been doing this since at least the 1990s, with thirty years of deferred (read: little to no) maintenance racked up. Some years ago I saw an estimate of something like $1.5 trillion dollars just to catch up on the deferred maintenance of roads and bridges, and then you've got power, water, rail, schools, and lots more. There's an awful lot of road and rail in the US that's genuine third-world standard, roads patched and potholed with dirt tracks next to them instead of footpaths, rails so worn and warped that you can't take a train down them at more than a snail's pace, etc.
So yes, infrastructure is really, really difficult if you're in Ethiopia or Burkina Faso or Angola or the USA.
DR
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