Crumbling Highways and Excuses for Socialism
Conn Carroll /
CATO’s Chris Edwards writes:
There is much talk of a second economic “stimulus” bill that would send tens of billions of added federal tax dollars to state governments for infrastructure. Senator Obama recently promised “to put two million more Americans to work, rebuilding our crumbling roads and schools and bridges.”
Is America’s infrastructure really crumbling? Many highways are congested, but at least on the East Coast where I travel, states seem to be continually adding capacity. With schools, the pattern I see is governments building large new structures and knocking down buildings that were built only a few decades ago. When I was a kid I lived for a while in England and went to a school that was about 100 years old, which I thought was kinda cool.
Anyway, if more infrastructure than usual really is crumbling, then governments are doing something wrong because the chart shows that total state and local capital investment is actually up in recent years.
Heritage fellow Ron Utt voices a similar concern:
Many involved in this exercise to increase taxes for transportation see their efforts as timely and urgent. But aggressive efforts by the business community and state and local officials to tap into the federal treasury to fund local transportation projects are as old as the republic, and they are no more sensible today than they were two centuries ago.
…
Despite the national attention it has received, much of the current debate on infrastructure is simply wrong, and it may very well be more wrongheaded today than at any time in the past two centuries. More to the point, as any list of infrastructure “needs” and “problems” reveals, nearly all troubled areas can be described as those where government owns and operates the means of production. In effect, what Americans now confront is a problem familiar to the citizens of Bulgaria and Belarus: The crisis of socialism.
Edwards and Utt have similar policy prescriptions. Edwards writes: (more…)