In the entire political realm, perhaps no arena illustrates this gap between rhetoric and reality more starkly than infrastructure repair and replacement: Politicians regularly opine about the need to rebuild America and produce millions of jobs in the process … Michael Kreger, an award-winning professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who studies rehabilitation of structural concrete buildings and bridges, had a similar view, telling me in an email: “Perhaps the status quo will not change until deteriorating infrastructure leads to one or more events resulting in significant loss of life.”