Time for an Infrastructure Investment

Photo by Jared Murray on Unsplash

The unfolding disaster in Texas over recent weeks highlights a topic that has been ignored for too long: America needs a major infrastructure upgrade. The Trump Administration bungled its promised infrastructure investment so badly and repeatedly that "infrastructure week" became the punchline of a joke. So far, the Biden Administration isn't faring much better.

Rather than the estimated $2 trillion investment in infrastructure that is needed and that could set our country up for sustained growth in the coming decades, Biden has proposed, and the House approved today, a $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan -- a quarter of which will fund $1,400 checks to individuals that could be spent on rent, utilities and health care, but could also be spent on Xboxes, Tostitos and White Claws.

No doubt a COVID relief bill of some amount is critical to fund testing, vaccine distribution, and improved safety measures -- as well as provide immediate relief to people suffering acute housing, employment and healthcare crises due to the pandemic. But $1.9 trillion dollars is an enormous number. To put it in perspective, that is about half of the entire $3.8 trillion in tax revenue the US expects to raise in FY 2021. If we're going to increase federal spending by that magnitude, wouldn't we rather have it go into lasting structural improvements with tangible long-term value, rather than shot-in-the-arm "stimulus" checks that will quickly dissipate?

Investment in roads, airports, electrical grids, water utilities, communications networks and other infrastructure is exactly the kind of economic stimulus we need. Instead of giving away free money, let's hire and train Americans to build what needs to be built to renew our prosperity for the long-haul. Such projects not only create jobs but lay the foundation for ongoing economic growth.

Sometime around the Reagan Administration, which was still riding the coattails of the huge infrastructure investments of the post-war boom, it became taboo to invest in infrastructure. Big government spending was the enemy and huge sectors of the economy were privatized, from transportation to electrical grids to communication networks. But private companies simply cannot make investments of the scale and time horizon of the federal government, so it didn’t happen for decades. And Texas is the latest reminder of how dangerous under-invested, private-sector infrastructure can be.

We're now all paying the price of our crumbling, nearly century-old infrastructure. We have a housing crisis, but we don't build more affordable housing. We have an education crisis, but we don't invest in our schools. We have a health care crisis, but we don't invest in affordable and accessible hospitals for everyone. In the rush to spend on COVID relief, I hope we don’t miss the long-term opportunity to invest in infrastructure. It’s time to build.