Decisions, Decisions

The United States is saddled with a rapidly decaying and woefully underfunded transportation system that will undermine its status in the global economy unless Congress and the public embrace innovative reforms, a bipartisan panel of experts concludes in a report released Monday

Failing U.S. transportation system will imperil prosperity, report finds

The strains to our transmission system have been evident for some time.


"The U. S. transmission system is under tremendous strain and only marginally stable," Wayne Brunetti, the former chief executive officer of Xcel Energy, observed in 2002. "It was designed as a regional system and has been forced to function as a national system, a function for which it was not designed and does not handle very well," he said.


The problem is that, nearly 10 years later, what Brunetti said is still true.

The US Electric Grid: Will it be Our Undoing? - Revisited

As ThinkProgress has noted, there are currently two competing visions of governance in the United States. One, the conservative vision, believes in the on-your-own society, and informs a policy agenda that primarily serves the well off and privileged sectors of the country. The other vision, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background.

Tennessee County’s Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down

At least one in four children was poor in nearly 190 counties in 39 states in 2009, a time of severe recession. In 33 counties in 17 states, at least one in three children was living in poverty. The American Community Survey for 2009, released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows rising poverty in the majority of states, with children much more likely to be poor than other age groups.

Help Needed Now for Growing Number of Children in Poverty

The worst consequences of climate change are likely to unfold only over decades or centuries — in other words, in our children’s or grandchildren’s or great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetimes, not ours. The decision of how much to spend now to avert climate changes hinges on assessing how much it is worth to us now to prevent that future damage. Since most of us would prefer money now over money later, economists typically figure that we’re willing to spend only less than a dollar now to prevent a dollar’s worth of damage in a year, or in a decade. The percentage less is called the “social discount rate.”

'Discounting' the future cost of climate change

The worst consequences of climate change is extinction.