The Alliance for American Competitiveness

Major business leaders (Caterpillar, UPS, Dow, BNSF, Honeywell) create new group to advocate for US infrastructure. They state:

America’s past economic success was built upon infrastructure development. It was in 1806 that Congress appropriated the first funds for a federally funded road that stretched from Maryland to Illinois.

Over the next two centuries, the American infrastructure expanded to include 160,000 miles of railway tracks, 12,000 miles of commercially active, navigable waterways, four million miles of highway and more than 3,300 airports servicing the world’s safest and most efficient national airspace. Those investments became the backbone of the world’s most dynamic and powerful economy.

Now, the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure investment. While our economic competitors are allocating huge amounts of money in infrastructure development, the U.S. has been under investing for nearly 40 years and it has been nearly a decade since Congress approved a long-term transportation authorization bill.

More than 17.6 billion tons of goods moved through the U.S. transportation system in 2011. Today, more than 16 million U.S. jobs depend on imports. Those jobs span all aspects of our economy ranging from agriculture, the service industry, manufacturing and retail.

Our economic future can be built on infrastructure too – if we make the right investments. If we, as a country, fail to do so, we will be leaving potential jobs uncreated, containers unshipped, and an overall economy that is literally stuck in traffic.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for every $1 spent on infrastructure over a 2 year period yields nearly double, $1.92, in direct and indirect economic output. Over two decades, the impact of that $1 more than triples to $3.21 in economic output.

If Congress strategically invests today, it will lay the foundation for long term economic growth and job creation over the next 30, 40, even 50 years.

See more at their website http://theafac.org/who-we-are/