It is a great time to be a Surveyor or Civil Engineer if you live in China!
- Land Development is dead in the U.S., it is flourishing in China due to increasingly wealthy population and a huge influx of ex-patriate workers.
- Government is the largest funding source of engineering projects, but U.S. government refuses to spend on Infrastructure (The Fall of Rome repeats itself)
- U.S. infrastructure is crumbling with no repair in sight. We now pay the victims of our catastrophic failures off and call it "the cost of doing business" and we fix the one failed structure. This is part of a risk analysis that shows it is cheaper to pay victims than to fix the underlying inafrastructure.
- U.S. government leaders are clueless; blinded by their own short term agendas to their constituents. They will bail out huge corrupt and inefficent companies but they won't invest in building America's infrastructure.
- This from Mitch McConnell (KY) as reported in USA Today 2/15/11! In response to Obama's proposed budget for 2012 on Monday, Senate GOP leader
Mitch McConnell said that "we don't have the money" to pay for "trains and windmills."
- Financing from banks to small business dried up years ago and there is no financing for any speculative projects.
On the other hand:
- China spends 12% of its GDP on infrastructure, US spends 2%.
- China is spending $600B on high speed rail over the next 3 years. They build 22KM of high speed rail/day.
- U.S. hopes to spend $53B over the next 6 years (if republicans let them). This is about 5% of what China is accomplishing now.
- China spends $60B/year on military, U.S. spends $600B/year. And few people doubt the military power of China.
- China is becoming the new #1 world power and their priority is to build their country. Our priority is military, period.
- There are more Honor Role students in China than we have total number of students in America!
- The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates it will cost more than $2 trillion to bring roads, bridges, and other infrastructure to a state of good repair. Clearly we have allowed our EXISTING infrastructure to decay to this level, where is the money to move us forward? How many more trillions are needed to move us to a world leading status? Will it get funded?
- It is a great time to be a Surveyor or Civil Engineer if you live in China, what a shame!
