Yonah Freemark, someone I link to often, is a strong supporter of heavy investment in transportation infrastructure. Though I’m more of a cheapskate than Yonah, I’m sympathetic to public investment in intrametropolitan transportation because I think that increasing mobility is a more effective poverty-fighting tool than is commonly understood. Yonah and I tend to disagree on things like high-speed rail infrastructure, but I was impressed by this passage:

The Obama Administration’s attempts over the past two years to make the argument that government investments in infrastructure have had bipartisan support for more of the past century has arguably backfired in the face of a stridently anti-government-investment Tea Party and its apparent backers in the Congress, many of the increasingly conservative members of the Republican Party. Attempting to differentiate themselves from the Democrats, the GOP has taken a no-compromise approach and will fight any increases in spending.

I actually don’t think anti-spending sentiment is primarily about brand differentiation. Rather, I think it reflects a widely-held belief — a belief I share — that we need to right-size the public sector in the United States. My view is that the best way to do so is to adopt a two-pronged approach: (1) impose fiscal discipline, i.e., tight, transparent budgets and (2) give public sector managers more autonomy to meet objectives set by democratically-elected legislators. This doesn’t seem like an unbridgeable divide to me, though of course public sector unions and other incumbents will fight this approach tooth and nail.

Without persuasively arguing for a tax increase to pay for such transportation improvements, the White House sounds depressingly like the Bush Administration when it was defending the Iraq War by arguing that it could be accomplished with no public sacrifice. President Bush, rather, encouraged us to increase our personal consumption, as if that would somehow compensate for the massive tax cuts his Administration had pushed through a cowardly Congress. We now suffer from the resulting consequences. Does Mr. Obama think he can get away with the same thing, when his Administration cannot identify a sound funding source?

Yonah and I disagree on the virtues of low taxes, but this basic idea that politicians should make the case that their priorities are worth paying for is one that I strongly embrace. If we need better infrastructure, let’s explain why it’s worth paying for. I happen to think we can have a better infrastructure by embracing congestion pricing and other tools designed to encourage better allocation of existing roads, landing slots, etc., and by facilitating the creation of more privately-owned infrastructure. But I also think that it makes sense to shift some from entitlements and tax expenditures towards transportation, and that also requires an affirmative argument.

Investments in transportation, as cities have proven, are popular. If provided a compelling argument, voters are willing to pay more to get access to better roads, transit systems, and railways. The question for the Obama Administration is not so much how much it wants to spend, but rather what defense it will mount (if any) for increasing taxes to pay for that spending. Whatever the current political atmosphere, we are not going to substantially improve the nation’s transportation system without doing so.

This also applies to expanding access to medical coverage. The Obama White House insisted that it could pay for PPACA without touching under-$250K households, a claim that stretched the limits of credulity. That claim will, I suspect, deepen public cynicism as the trust costs become clear.