Infrastructure was once at the heart of American public policy. Works such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Hoover Dam, and the Interstate Highway System transformed the economy. Today, the US spends significantly less, as a share of G.D.P., on infrastructure than it did fifty years ago. The Washington Metro is in such a state that fixing it may require shutting whole lines for months at a time. From the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks in the Northeast Corridor, the infrastructure is decaying. Once you adjust for depreciation, the U.S. makes no net investment in public infrastructure. This results in wasted time, lost productivity, poor public-health outcomes, and increased carbon emissions. Actually, infrastructure spending is popular with a majority of voters across the income spectrum. Historically, it enjoyed bipartisan support from politicians, too. If it’s so popular, why doesn’t it happen?
One clear reason is politics. For the Republican base of suburban and rural voters in the South and in much of the West, public transport is way down the list of priorities. Then you have the people with an aversion to government spending and big infrastructure projects. There’s also a deeper, bureaucratic issue. Over the years, the process of getting infrastructure projects approved has become riddled with what political scientists call “veto points.” There are more environmental regulations and more requirements for community input. There are often multiple governing bodies for new projects, each of which has to give its approval. Many of these veto points were put in place for good reason. But they make it harder to undertake big projects.
And the US isn’t even maintaining the existing infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives America’s over-all infrastructure a grade of D-plus, has said that we would need to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it up to snuff. (Part of an article in The Week)
I personally drive as little as possible – unusually un-American. But there is one quite important street in Washington I have to use frequently. Driving along it is makes me seriously worry about the integrity of the car and its suspension, so bad is the surface and so frequent the potholes. And this near the center of the nation’s capital. Not good for peace of mind. The U.S Congress, always interfering in the government of the city, don’t like infrastructure maintenance, even of it affects them personally.
There are political reasons that maintenance gets ignored. It’s handled mainly by state and local communities, which, because many of them can’t run fiscal deficits, operate under budgetary pressures. Term limits mean that a politician who cuts maintenance spending may not be around when things go wrong. There’s also the so- called “edifice complex”: what politician doesn’t like opening something new and having a nice press op at the ribbon-cutting? But no one ever writes articles saying, “Region’s highways are still about as good as they were last year.” Roads and bridges are boring to both media and politicians.
One possible option, at least with highways, is privatisation. Now normally I would be opposed to this, I consider maintaining good infrastructure the government’s responsibility and not something that should turn a profit. But in the case of America, where there is so little appetite for increased government spending, I would rather have a nice private highway than a poorly maintained government one. They’ve done this in Texas, where everyone has a TxTag- an electronic device that detects every time you use a private highway and charges you $1.50. Of course, there would be regulations on how much the private company can charge and how big and well-maintained the highway has to be.
If electability wasn’t an issue, I would propose raising the US gasoline tax. The American gas tax is the lowest in the developed world (excluding the Arab nations of course); it hasn’t even been raised since 1993. I would raise it from 18.4 cents a gallon to 30 cents, and make it the same for petrol and diesel. I would then index it to CPI so it would go up annually. The money would then be used exclusively for infrastructure improvements. There would also probably be some money left to subsidise public transport. The tax rise is fair: the more you drive, the more you pay. It would discourage ever-expanding suburbia in favour of more efficient use of land. It would discourage excessive car use. And states where people have to drive long distances would be allowed to fund a rebate for low income people who find paying the higher taxes hard.