Successful Long-Term Strategy Remains Elusive

One would think that Washington’s policymakers would have the wherewithal to deal with something as simple as planning for infrastructure. After all, people like infrastructure, irrespective of their political allegiances.

While it is true that some people prefer mass transit to roads and others prefer rail to trucks, at the end of the day we all use infrastructure and know that investing in it can fuel massive social rates of return by linking people and communities together. Other issues are inherently trickier, whether immigration or gun control, but infrastructure should be a lay-up.

For whatever reason, policymakers make sustainable infrastructure financing look extraordinarily difficult. This manifests itself in various ways, including in the form of the low grades that the American Society of Civil Engineers assigns to various types of infrastructure every four years. It also shows up in the form of massive traffic jams, potholes, delayed flights, sewage spills, flickering lights, and regular flooding.

With respect to roads and bridges, a previous generation of leaders created the Highway Trust Fund, forged in 1956 to finance America’s interstate highway network. Subsequently, policymakers created a Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund. In April 2019, it was announced that this account had failed its solvency test for the fiscal year 2020. The Highway Trust Fund itself is set for insolvency, in part because the gas tax that helps finance it hasn’t been raised since 1993. So much for the commitment to infrastructure.

Nonetheless, elected officials or those who seek to be elected frequently discuss infrastructure even if little is actually done to resolve issues. South Bend Mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg recently released details regarding his $1 trillion infrastructure plan ahead of a January 2020 Democratic debate.

Among other things, should he become president, he would supply state and local governments more authority in the infrastructure planning process. That may be a good idea, but what’s really needed are reliable streams of funding so that the nation and its many communities can plan for long-term infrastructure needs rather than simply patching that which already exists.