Our Infrastructure Is Not Crumbling

L isten to President Biden talk about the state of infrastructure, and you might imagine America as Beirut circa 1983 — a place where children can drink water only by dipping their tiny hands into the puddles they find on pothole-strewn roads that sit in front of schoolhouses made of asbestos-lined cardboard boxes and held together by discarded string.

Our infrastructure, as you’ve no doubt heard, is “crumbling.” Reporters have been perfunctorily repeating this claim for decades. I’m relatively certain the last time the word “infrastructure” was uttered without “crumbling” was before I was born. In 1986, the New York Times editorialized that “our crumbling infrastructure” was a “national disgrace.” By 1992, numerous publications were lamenting the nation’s “crumbling” infrastructure. Bill Clinton warned that the infrastructure was “crumbling.” Barack Obama said we had “crumbling infrastructure.” Donald Trump also said infrastructure was “crumbling.” And until all of us are riding high-speed bullet trains to our union jobs assembling solar panels for the common good, the infrastructure shall continue to crumble.

In Pittsburgh last week, Biden rolled out his $2 trillion “American Jobs Plan” — which will be coupled with another reportedly $2 trillion effort to fix our health care system, again — to fix the “crumbling infrastructure.”

Biden does a lot of big thinking with your grandkids’ money. Two problems: One, the infrastructure bill has as much to do with traditional infrastructure as his COVID-relief bill had to do with the pandemic — which is to say, if we’re being generous, about 7 percent of its spending. Two, we already “invest” a ton of money on our infrastructure, which is, despite perceptions, in pretty good shape.

Of course, the American people love to hear about new roads, highways, and bridges. For many voters, “infrastructure” is about the pothole they hit on their way to work rather than the thousands of miles of roads they drive on that are safe and fine. Around $115 billion of President Biden’s bill would be allocated for the type of “infrastructure” most people are probably imagining. The rest is another grab bag of left-wing policy wants, union bailouts, and green-energy projects.

For liberals, then, “infrastructure” is about windmills, green grids, and the antiquated choo-choo trains that One Percenters like Joe Biden like to take up and down the East Coast corridor. Amtrak has lost money for 50 straight years, or around the same number of years the president has been in Washington pretending to be an Everyman.

Most of these “crumbling infrastructure” bills rely on demagoguery. “It’ll fix the nation’s ten most economically significant bridges in America that require replacement,” Biden said. “Remember that bridge that went down?”

I “remember” the bridge that went down on Interstate 35 over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis in 2007. I also remember that federal investigators found that the collapse was due to a design flaw that escaped inspectors. Still, the proportion of American bridges rated as poor has decreased from 9.4 percent in 2012 to 7.5 percent by 2019 — and none of them are considered at risk of “falling down.” According to a 2018 Reuters analysis of the nation’s bridges — expansively defining a bridge as anything that crosses a creek or bigger — only 4 percent of those carrying significant traffic needed repairs. Of the nation’s 1,200 busiest bridges, the number considered structurally deficient falls to under 2 percent — or fewer than 20 bridges.

We could probably pay for all those repairs right now with the savings we would gain by overturning the unconstitutional Davis-Bacon Act, which forces the government to pay prevailing union wages.

Then again, what many voters probably don’t know when listening to Biden is that we spend plenty on roads and bridges. Federal, state, and local government spending is at around $415 billion per year on capital investments and maintenance. On top of that spending, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015 added another $305 billion over the past five years. Apparently, it did not fix things.

Among the numerous, sometimes barely coherent, claims Biden made in Pittsburgh was an argument that failing to pass another $2 trillion “investment” would add “debt and effectively puts our children at a disadvantage relative to our competitors.” Perhaps one day Biden, on pace to become the most profligate president in American history, will expound on how trillions in spending would reduce debt — but I doubt your kids will be at much of a disadvantage to China if the Amtrak line they would never use doesn’t exist.

One of the new ruses in politics is to insist that we need giant state-run technocracies to “out-compete” China. But for every gleaming Shanghai, there’s a patchwork of failures. Through misappropriation of funds by top-down, out-of-touch economic planners, the kind that many Democrats seem to want to emulate, China has succeeded in erecting a network of ghost towns and empty airports.

The Chinese government is nefarious. We don’t beat China by acting more like China.