“The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U. S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.”

Ever since ASCE began issuing its “National Infrastructure Report Card” in 1998, the nation has gotten a dismal grade of D or D+. In the meantime, the estimated cost of fixing its infrastructure has gone up from $1.3 trillion to $4.6 trillion.
While American politicians debate endlessly over how to finance the needed fixes and which ones to implement, the Chinese have managed to fund massive infrastructure projects all across their country, including 12,000 miles of high-speed rail built just in the last decade...
A key difference between China and the US is that the Chinese government owns the majority of its banks... The US government could do that too, without raising taxes, slashing services, cutting pensions, or privatizing industries.... The federal government could set up a bank on a similar model. It has massive revenues, which it could leverage into credit for its own purposes. Since financing is typically about 50 percent of the cost of infrastructure, the government could cut infrastructure costs in half by borrowing from its own bank. Public-private partnerships are a good deal for investors but a bad deal for the public. The federal government can generate its own credit without private financial middlemen. That is how China does it, and we can to.

Ellen Brown: If China Can Fund Infrastructure With Its Own Credit, So Can We https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/18/if-china-can-fund-infrastructure-with-its-own-credit-so-can-we/, CounterPunch (18 May 2017)

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, August 16). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153505589600610/
2015, Facebook

The Manila Times http://www.manilatimes.net/escudero-files-bill-mandating-dpwh-to-make-roads-safer/209625/
2015

La trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 : impuissance du droit et vérité des comptes http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2563481 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n48 (2014).
Budgetary policy, From the Expensive 30 toe the Expensive 36, The Expensive 36

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century"
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

Wang Kwo-tsai (2021) cited in " East coast express train speeds to rise https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/11/30/2003768771" on Taipei Times, 30 November 2021

Twitter, https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1103961763614203904 (8 March 2019)
Twitter account, March 2019

[Assessing and monitoring forest biodiversity: a suggested framework and indicators, Forest Ecology and Management, 115, 2–3, 22 March 1999, 135–146, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112798003946] (quote from p. 135)