I included infrastructure repair and improvement as one of
my high priority categories for federal funding in part I of this series of
posts. Infrastructure – roads, bridges, railway lines, seaports, airports,
power and water and sewer systems, communication lines, and the like – are the
framework that supports the entire economy. It is what allows efficient
movement of raw materials to factories and finished products to markets, provides
the energy and communication businesses need to run, and the facilities to move
people around as they need to.
Building and repairing infrastructure is a joint local,
state and federal obligation. We have neglected the American infrastructure for
decades, largely because infrastructure work doesn’t generate many votes either
at the local level or nationally, so it has been an easy thing to underfund so
as to divert funds for things that attract more voters.
How bad are things? We built our last major airport (Denver
International) in 1995, more than 20 years ago.
By comparison, China is building 66 new major airports over the next
five years. An engineering survey in 2016 found 58,000 bridges in the US which
are structurally deficient (ie – falling apart). Globally, the U.S. ranks 19th
— behind Spain, Portugal and Oman — in the quality of its infrastructure,
according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report. The American
Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE), in its annual Infrastructure Report Card,
gave the U.S. a D+, saying we need to invest some $3.6 trillion by 2020 to
upgrade our infrastructure.
We have been spending about 1.5% of our GDP on
infrastructure maintenance in the past few years. Most of this comes from state
and local funds, but during the economic downturn of the past decade states and
local authorities have had to cut back, especially since many cannot run
deficits by law (something the federal government could stand to have imposed
on it). Many states and cities are also in financial trouble because they have
accumulated huge pension obligations for their public workers, and so simply
don’t have funds for infrastructure work.
Once again the argument for including infrastructure repair
and upgrading in my list of top priorities for federal funding is economic –
the economy drives and funds everything else we want. Poor infrastructure costs the economy, so it
is a high priority to attend to it.
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