If we had some ham, the old saying goes, we could have some ham and eggs. If only we had some eggs. If we had the money, the new saying goes, we could fix our decaying infrastructure. If we had the materials. But we don’t.

Infrastructure is a cold, hard word. But it means the house in which the industrial world lives — the electric grid, the water and sewer lines, the roads and bridges, dams, airports, seaports, on and on. And our industrial world in America is on the verge of being homeless because the house is rotting down, the electric lines sparking dangerously, the water lines leaking, the roads and bridges rotting away.

Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives and the President recently agreed to spend $2 trillion on the problem. Set aside for the moment the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would take twice that amount of money to do the job. Set aside for the moment that this $2 trillion dollar figure is at the moment just a notion — it does not exist in any budget bill, it has not been allocated or appropriated. It’s just a thought.

If appropriated, the money will have to be, in the current idiom, “paid for,” which means — at least for “fiscal conservatives” — that for every dollar spent on infrastructure we will have to cut a dollar from Medicare and Social Security. God forbid we should take any money away from paying for impulsive regime-change wars around the world.

But let’s assume the Congress finds its courage and votes the money, and the President does the responsible thing and signs off on the budget, and the Congress sticks to its guns and actually appropriates the money. I know, I’m getting a bit light-headed myself making all those assumptions in one sentence. But let’s assume, for one giddy moment, that we have the ham.

Now, what about the eggs?

We’re going to need a lot of steel. 56,000 of our bridges are designated as structurally deficient. Just one bridge — the Golden Gate, for example — contains 88,000 tons of steel plus 80,000 miles of steel wire in its cables. Our power grid — 640,000 miles of high-voltage power lines (strung from steel towers) — is at full capacity and well beyond its expected life span. The average age of the 90,000 dams in the US is 56 years, and the American Society of Civil Engineers grades their condition as “D”. Building just one dam, the Hoover Dam, took 45 million pounds of steel rebar, 88 million pounds of plate steel and 4.4 million yards of concrete.

Where are we going to get that kind of steel? A century ago we made half the steel in the world, now we struggle to see five percent. It takes iron to make steel, and today it is China that mines nearly half the world’s iron, followed by Australia, Brazil and India. The US barely makes the list of the top ten iron producers.

We’re going to need a lot of manganese. Turns out you can’t make steel without adding 10-20 pounds of manganese to every ton of iron. That makes manganese the fourth-ranked commodity metal in the world. The United States does not produce any. It is mined in Gabon, South Africa, Australia, and Brazil. Not to mention vanadium and rare earths, essential to steel production, available primarily from China, with whom we are currently engaged in a trade war, and who is threatening to ban rare earth exports to the US..

We’re going to need a lot of sand for the concrete and asphalt it would take to fix the three-quarters of all roads in the country that are deemed by the US Department of Transportation to be “in dire need” of repair and upgrades. And there is a growing global shortage of sand (at least the sand that can be used for these purposes) in the face of demand not only from decades of development, but now from fracking and the Chinese Belt and Road global initiative as well.

With the national debt north of $20 trillion and growing wildly, we are unlikely to have any ham again; and with eggs as scarce as hens’ teeth, you can forget about them. Looks like cold gruel for breakfast. For a long time.

“DSC_3504” by Ken OHYAMA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0