Conservative bloggers are attacking Candidate Obama for his statement on China where he said the following:

 "Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business … you're starting to think, "Beijing looks like a pretty good option." Why aren't we doing the same thing?"

So the bloggers are attacking Obama for being pro communist. Well I agree with him. China is growing fast and they are working very hard on upgrading their infrastructure to fuel the growth in their economy. And America? We are relying on infrastructure that was largely built in the '50s and '60s and it is starting to affect our ability to compete globally. You can read about one example of the problem in this article on agriculture infrastructure. The bottom line is that our infrastructure is no longer world class. 

Our government is largely responsible for this by discouraging new infrastructure through their labyrinth of regulations.  Another problem is that we are not spending enough on new infrastructure. The liberals would rather give money to people to stay at home and watch reality TV then to spend it on job creating projects. I was rather surprised this week when I saw an image of a Chinese maglev train in Beijing. I have been reading about maglev trains for years and how they could revolutionize transportation. So there it was in China, and I thought to myself why don't we have one here? You can find other examples of how US airports, ports, and other infrastructure is falling behind the other industrial nations. There is no doubt that we need to invest in ourselves by investing in new modern infrastructure.

So I agree with Candidate Obama. The fast pace of Chinese modernization is impressive and should make us stop and think, what should we be doing to compete with this? I know that the concerns of conservatives is Obamas Marxist leanings and I share those concerns. But if you want to argue against Obama, then argue with him based on how he wants to expand government and our dependency on it. Argue about how he plans on paying for his 1 trillion dollar programs. Argue about his ideas on foreign policy and whether they are naive or not. Argue about his apparent elitist attitude and how that will affect the way he would govern. But don't condemn him for pointing out the obvious, even if he uses a communist nation as an example. We must upgrade our infrastructure or fall behind the rest of the world.

 - Thomas Paine 2

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