Shoring up tumbledown ports. Patching pothole-riddled roads. Upgrading aging bridges.rnIt's hardly the sexy stuff of government. "Congress doesn't like filling potholes; it doesn't have a lot of zing to it," says Martin Neal Baily, a former head of the Council on Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton who studies competitiveness and productivity at the Brookings Institution.rnBut talk to CEOs who depend on America's crumbling infrastructure, and it's clear they see this decidedly unglamorous work as vital to national competitiveness. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that the decaying transportation system annually costs the American economy $63 billion in lost time and fuel. "The most important thing for the new President to do is invest in the infrastructure of the country-the fundamental things we need to do to grow our businesses," says Marc Benioff, chief executive of Web software maker salesforce.com.
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