Here is Fareed Zakaria at The Washington Post:
Every two minutes, a water main breaks in America. The total amount of treated water wasted every day is about 6 billion gallons, or 9,000 swimming pools. Every day! And it highlights why the infrastructure bill that President Biden just signed into law is so important. The need to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure has become a weary cliche — but that doesn’t change the fact that it is indeed falling apart. And just as is the case with any kind of deferred maintenance, the longer we wait, the worse the problem becomes — and the more expensive it will be to fix.
One way to make clear what a shift the Biden administration’s infrastructure legislation represents is to look at the amount that the federal government has spent on infrastructure over the decades. In the 1950s and ’60s, infrastructure spending as a percent of gross domestic product was over 1 percent. In 2019, decades later and with an exponentially bigger economy, spending was at about 0.7 percent of GDP. The new surge of spending from the bill will raise it to about 1.3 percent over the next five years. And the bill has many good ideas to encourage private investments that would increase these numbers.
And this:
Infrastructure sounds like a bore, but it’s important not simply because of the obvious fact that it makes the economy run. Spending on infrastructure is a sign of a healthy society that is willing to invest in its future. Yale economist Ray Fair wrote a paper in September in which he analyzed the United States’ infrastructure spending from 1929 to 2019. He found that it was around the 1970s that spending as a percentage of GDP started to plunge, never to fully recover. It was also about that time that America began routine deficit spending. To him, both are signs of a society that is more interested in spending on consuming in the present than investing for the future. The federal government spends $4 for every senior citizen compared with $1 for every person 18 and younger. In 2019, the federal government spent $4 on the elderly and disabled for every $1 it spent on children.
Fair sees the infrastructure bill as a very small shift in that long-term trend. But let’s celebrate the change and hope that we can begin, once again, to embark on some bold endeavors for the country’s future.
Read the entire piece here. I would even say that we should understood infrastructure as part of a pro-life agenda. Of course not everyone agrees:
