Americans spend 6.9 billion thankless hours in traffic
As you struggle in Thanksgiv- ing traffic, consider the following: American vehicles spend 6.9 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, according to American Society of Civil Engineers.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that is a lot.
If each of these vehicles — which include buses — had an average of 1.5 adults in them, these vehicle hours would translate to roughly 5 million unpaid fulltime jobs. Or enough hours to build the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam more than 100 times each.
And the numbers are getting worse quickly. By 2020, those 6.9 billion lost hours are projected to be 8.3 billion lost hours.
Which is a good way of saying that America needs a big jolt of investment in transportation infrastructure. A trillion dollars over the next 10 years on top of the roughly $900 billion already slated would not be extravagant.
A good bit of that is needed just to fix facilities that have fallen into disrepair. And significant investments in new capacity are needed to keep the U.S. economy from falling behind. These would include expanding roads and constructing highways as well as mass transit systems.
While this might seem impossible for a federal government nearly $20 trillion in debt, and for states that face their own loom- ing pension crises, it is not. In fact, it would likely pay for itself in enhanced economic activity.
The civil engineers estimate that the economic cost from underinvestment in infrastructure is $147 billion annually, rising to $238 billion in 2025.
And yet resistance to such a wise investment is endemic. Since 2002, federal spending on transportation infrastructure has dropped 23% (adjusted for inflation). States have decreased their spending by 30%.
President Obama included a modest and short-lived uptick in infrastructure spending in his 2009 fiscal stimulus. But then he spent the next seven years urging more, to no avail.
Now the voters have elected Donald Trump as president. He, too, is a big supporter of infrastructure spending, proposing a $550 billion injection at the federal level over the next decade.
As is often the case in Washington these days, much of the focus and attention is on the gimmicky ways the program might be financed. Rather than offsetting the cost with tax hikes or spending cuts, or simply declaring that the boost to the economy would fund the plan, Trump wants to finance it through a tax windfall from repatriated corporate profits overseas.
By declaring a temporary rate of 10% (well below the current 35%), much of the estimated $2 trillion being held overseas by U.S. corporations would come home, where it would be both taxed and invested in the domestic economy.
That might seem like a good idea. But it would complicate efforts at a permanent reform of the tax code that would prevent so much money from staying abroad in the first place.
Regardless of what fig leaf Congress comes up with, investment in getting around is greatly needed. If nothing happens, a Thanksgiving telecommute might not be too far off.