Here's what I wrote in 2015, thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in the preceding years, gone into Afghan "roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and a $43 million gas station" built in the middle of nowhere, rather than into this country: "Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray.
As the latest addition to Toronto's fraying infrastructure, the Sheppard subway is largely untroubled by urban bustle.
In January Mr Schwarzenegger grandly announced a ten-year plan to invest almost $223 billion, including $68 billion in taxpayers' bonds, to upgrade the state's fraying infrastructure.
Only with successful schools can New York retain and expand its middle class and maintain a tax base sufficient to modernize a fraying infrastructure.
The daily frustrations are exacerbated by fraying infrastructure, much of it built with western cash and expertise with little thought for long-term sustainability.
While waiting for education investments to pay off, however, Mr. Gross says the government should finance immediate job creation to shore up the third structural weakness: America's fraying infrastructure.
A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we'd be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure.
After all, can anyone really doubt that representative democracy as it once existed has been eviscerated and is now -- consider Congress exhibit A -- in a state of advanced paralysis, or that just about every aspect of the country's infrastructure, is slowly fraying or crumbling and that little is being done about it?
Its economy was fraying, its infrastructure crumbling.
The story she tells is ominously similar to that of airport security: a crucial but unglamorous piece of our public infrastructure has been allowed to fray to the point of collapse -- partly because we have relied on the private sector to do the public sector's job, partly because public agencies have been starved of resources by politicians busily posturing against "big government".
