Word on the street is that President Obama will call for yet more “infrastructure” spending in his Wednesday<\/del> Thursday night campaign speech<\/del> address to Congress.\u00a0 Russ Roberts, of Econtalk, makes the effective rebuttal to this idea (as with most of the President’s ideas, it’s too amorphous to call it a “plan”) in two posts, “Crumbling<\/a>“, and “Shovel Ready<\/a>.”\u00a0 In Shovel Ready, he notes that Japan spent a decade spending money on “shovel ready” public works projects that provided little economic benefit above and beyond the circulation of currency for its own sake (or its own sake).<\/p>\n

In Crumbling, he shows that we’ve been increasing<\/em> the percentage of GDP spent on infrastructure for about three decades, and yet still hear complaints about “crumbling infrastructure.’\u00a0 He then goes on to quote a New York Times<\/em> column giving examples of waste here.\u00a0 One thing he doesn’t mention is that building pointless roads isn’t just a one-time expense – we’re stuck with the maintenance of those roads pretty much forever, lest they, too “crumble.”<\/p>\n

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Of course, this was before the most recent “stimulus,” and all those orange signs proclaiming spending throughout the land and to all the commutants thereof.<\/p>\n

Taken as a whole, it’s a powerful argument against the sort of fire-hose spending “plan” that will likely be announced Thursday night.<\/p>\n

I happen to believe that infrastructure is<\/em> one of the proper areas for government spending, for a variety of reasons.\u00a0 How best to do that can be the subject of vigorous debate, but the story of the Kansas Turnpike<\/a> shows the risks incurred when interstate projects aren’t attempted by an interstate authority.\u00a0 (For the moment, I’m happy to revisit the debates over political economy from the 1940s, but not the 1840s.)<\/p>\n

All of this is what makes the first stimulus package such a shame.\u00a0 In the 1950s, we had the luxury of buying North Dakota’s support for I-95 with I-94.\u00a0 We could make a lot of mistakes, and still get the thing basically right.\u00a0 We don’t have that luxury now.\u00a0 Wasting almost\u00a0 $1,000,000,000,000 in “infrastructure” spending in 2009 doesn’t mean we get to go back and clean up the mess.\u00a0 It means we don’t have the money to do it right this time, so there is<\/em> no this time.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine likes to bemoan Americans who won’t spend on infrastructure, but it’s probably one of the few areas where the overwhelming majority of us actually do agree.\u00a0 And if the government weren’t so busy\u00a0 doing all the other things it shouldn’t be doing, it might actually have the attention and money to get this one right.
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