Free Republic

Why can’t America build or repair infrastructure on a par with countries in Europe or Asia? Why are our bridges, roads, and airports not what they should be? Aren’t we the richest and most technologically savvy country in the world? Who or what is holding us back? Kyle Smith of National Review has the surprising (and frustrating) answer.

In her working hours, Melissa G. King administered benefit funds for the sandhogs’ union, associating with the muscled and plain-spoken men who blast through earth and darkness to build tunnels beneath the city. But in her free time, she squired her teenage daughter to the nation’s elite equestrian events, building a stable of horses that would be the envy of any on the horse-show circuit. The two worlds could not be more disparate. But to hear federal authorities tell it, she gained entry into one only by stealing from the other. Ms. King, 58, was charged last month with embezzling...

Hoping to protect one of the Bay Area's main water supplies after the next major earthquake, construction crews will soon embark on a job that sounds like something out of a Jules Verne novel: building a massive, 5-mile-long tunnel underneath San Francisco Bay.The project is believed to be the first major tunnel ever built across the bay.Using a giant boring machine, workers will carve a 14-foot high corridor through clay, sand and bedrock from Menlo Park to Newark as deep as 103 feet below the bay floor. They'll then run a 9-foot-high steel water pipe through the middle."All the experts...