The crisis of U.S. infrastructure, II

the nation’s infrastructure, however, took a dive during the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan’s aversion to using taxes for domestic spending, exacerbated by Wall Street’s obsession with quarterly earnings, encouraged a shortsightedness in assessing the public good. According to Sherle Schwenninger, the director of the New America Foundation’s economic growth program, the money that government at all levels has devoted to infrastructure, as a proportion of the nation’s total economic output, slipped from 3 percent during the 1950s and 1960s to only 2 percent in recent years. “We’ve just not reinvested,” former Council of Economic Advisers chairman Martin Baily complained at a Brookings Institution forum last fall, “because nobody wanted to raise the taxes to do that.” Even in Katrina-devastated Louisiana, when the Army Corps of Engineers announced in 2006 that its estimate for fixing the levees had ballooned from $3.5 billion to $9.5 billion, the state’s politicians and editorial writers wailed. It would not take many years, the argument went, before the weeds poked up through a neglected interstate highway. Not to worry. Even as the U.S. enthusiasm for long-term investments has flagged, the total amount of money spent on its infrastructure has continued to grow. As the federal share has shrunk (from 32 percent in 1982 to less than 24 percent in 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office [CBO]), state and local governments have picked up the slack. Counting all levels of government, public entities spent $312 billion on the U.S. transportation and water infrastructure in 2004, three times as much — after taking inflation into account — as in 1956, when Eisenhower’s heyday began.

Now, has the United States underfunded its infrastructure, on which its economy rests? “Compared to what we really need, I think so,” said Penner, a former CBO director, “but relatively slightly.” Solomon suggests we consider the state of U.S. bridges. Last summer’s tragedy in Minnesota cast a spotlight on the Federal Highway Administration’s alarming conclusion that, as of last December, 12 percent of U.S. bridges were structurally deficient. Less attention was paid to the fact that this proportion had shrunk from 13 percent in 2004 and nearly 19 percent in 1994. It was also not widely noticed that the label of “structurally deficient” covered a range of poor conditions, from serious to far less so. Fewer than a tenth of the tens of thousands of bridges deemed deficient are anywhere close to falling down