The crisis of U.S. infrastructure, III

of the issue (“Today nearly half the locks on our waterways are obsolete.”) and offered a detailed plan of attack, including a $10 billion emergency repair fund, $1.5 billion for public transit, $1 billion for intercity passenger railways, and sundry other millions for additional projects. Nine months later, however, facing political death as Indiana Democrats readied to vote, she climbed onto the back of a pickup truck and appealed to voters beleaguered by the soaring price of fuel. Her idea? Suspend the federal gasoline tax, which pays for the upkeep on the nation’s pivotal highways. Economists gagged at the thought, but Indiana Democrats rewarded her with a narrow victory.

The Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who agreed with Clinton on the gasoline tax, has also used infrastructure as a political football. It is a word he reveres. In campaign speeches, he has applied “infrastructure” to public health, alternative fuels, “the infrastructure of civil society,” and “the Republican infrastructure.” In the conventional sense, he has linked it to one of his trademark issues. “The problem with roads and infrastructure and bridges and tunnels in America can be laid right at the doorstep of Congress,” he said in May, four months after federal investigators blamed the Minnesota bridge collapse on a design flaw, “because the pork-barrel, earmark spending, such as the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ in Alaska, has diverted people’s hard-earned tax dollars that they pay at the gas pump.” This charge drew a public rebuke from Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota’s Republican governor, who is a national co-chairman of McCain’s campaign and is often mentioned as a possible running mate. “I don’t know what he’s basing that on,” Pawlenty said, “other than the general premise that projects got misprioritized throughout time.”

One legislator’s pork, of course, is another’s infrastructure. Such criticism of “pork,” as a result, has not dampened Congress’s enthusiasm for spending money on highways and such. The 2005 highway legislation (known, improbably, as SAFETEA-LU) authorized $286 billion over six years, $32 billion more than the Bush administration wanted. But this amount was miserly compared with the House-approved $380 billion. Members of Congress earmarked just one-tenth of the money for particular projects back home, and not all of those were considered boondoggles. An earmark, for instance, funded the newly built Woodrow Wilson Bridge along the Capital Beltway between Virginia and Maryland. The lobbyists for the labor unions and the contractors that stand to benefit from road construction are already gearing up for next year’s effort to reauthorize the highway bill. The pot will surely grow bigger — reportedly to $500 billion over six years — especially if a Democratic president works with a Democratic Congress. Spending on infrastructure has recently been touted by Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin, among others, as a Keynesian response to an impending recession. Even if earmark-happy highway bills inevitably waste money, they may be worthy of praise for paying up front for whichever roads and bridges — to nowhere or to somewhere — the democratic system has deemed worthy. “In the end, there’s no substitute for making systematic investment,” Representative Blumenauer said.

As a political issue, infrastructure is the kind that democracies have a hard time with — a chronic, usually invisible problem that only occasionally becomes acute. For better or worse, however, politics has become inseparable from the battles over infrastructure, sometimes to the point of amusement. When members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee discussed the fateful gusset plates in Minnesota, the Republicans stressed the arbitrary nature of such a failure, which money would never have averted, while the Democrats kept mentioning the bridge’s wear and tear, for which more money would have mattered. Partisan positions on gusset plates — who knew? Still, the politics of infrastructure are far from straightforward. Earmarks and pork find enthusiasts and critics within both political parties. Congestion pricing has produced odd bedfellows. Both Bush administration conservatives and environmental activists approve of such a market mechanism that would save fuel and improve economic efficiency, while some Democrats worry about the effect of “Lexus lanes” on the poor. Solomon concludes:

The true political divide may lie between Americans who’ll be willing and able to pay up front for the nation’s needs — whether through taxes or tolls — and those who would rather skimp or burden their children. This sort of decision, between a world-class infrastructure and muddling through, will be made in the political marketplace. If Americans get disgusted enough, they’ll do what it takes. Otherwise, they won’t.