Infrastructure is the most celebrated type of government spending. Politicians and commentators across the political spectrum portray it as one of the core functions of government. Most claim that America has abdicated its responsibility to maintain and improve its infrastructure.
This article argues that America creates and maintains too much infrastructure. There is widespread acceptance that America’s infrastructure costs too much on a project-by-project basis, due to mandates for everything from environmental planning to interest group contracting goals. There is less widespread understanding that American infrastructure projects today bring lower returns than before, regardless of the cost of individual projects, and many are bringing negative returns. These low returns would counsel for a vast reduction in government infrastructure spending.
One reason for the reduced value of infrastructure is that investment is going to older systems with long-term diminishing returns, such as trains, canals, highways, airports, electrical transmission, and water pipes—systems which are over a century old. The age of these systems is not due to a refusal to invest in new infrastructure, since it is not obvious that there are equivalent new technological frontier infrastructure projects that require significant public investment. The other reason for declining returns is that infrastructure projects are increasingly selected for reasons unrelated to citizen needs, which means more “roads to nowhere,” unused transit projects, and transmission lines that are not reducing electricity prices.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York University Journal of Law & Liberty
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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