单选题 A country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself; in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel. And a nation that once prized education—that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children—is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
We"re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions—essential services that have been provided for generations—are no longer affordable. And it"s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn"t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases. And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn"t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and "centrist" Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade. In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation"s foundations to crumble—literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education—they"re choosing the latter.
It"s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run. In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major burden on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment. And what about the economy"s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we"re going backward.
How did we get to this point? It"s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can"t do anything right. So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we"ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

单选题 America"s investment in roads used to ______

单选题 To get money for maintaining infrastructure, the state and local governments can ______

单选题 It is implied in the third paragraph that ______

单选题 The author attributes the present dire situation mainly to ______

单选题 The best title for the passage is ______