All hail to Evan Soltas for this piece, and may the Lord protect him from the wrath of his erstwhile pals.
By all means read the piece, but let me break down the highlights for you:
For the last 40 years, our infrastructure spending has tracked the rich country average, and it has not been falling recently. The quality of the roads we drive on has gone up and the percentage of "deficient" bridges has gone down (to 21.9% in 2009 from 37.8 in 1989).
In other words, we don't have an infrastructure crisis, we don't need a politically run national infrastructure bank, and, whatever the intrinsic merits of more stimulus may be, we don't have trillions of "no-brainer" investments in infrastructure that are desperately needed.
Maybe, just maybe, we can now stop piously repeating the calls of a special interest group (the American Society of Civil Engineers) for more money to be funneled their way.
1 comment:
A while ago Larry Summers stated as fact that bridges were collapsing every day. So I did a quick search of Google News. This isn't scientific, of course, but it should have given me at least one recent collapsing bridge story in the U.S. since it's happening all the time. None. Zilch. Nada.
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