Spending on infrastructure might need a private boost

“MASON CITY.

To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.” — Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men” (1946)

Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring for “internal improvements,” as infrastructure was known in the 19th century when canals, and then railroads, transformed America.

What rural electrification was eight decades ago, broadband access might be today: a blessing not widely enough enjoyed. But infrastructure spending will not have the economically and socially transformative effect that it had before America became a mature urban society. Princeton historian James M. McPherson writes that before all-weather macadamized roads, it cost the same to move a ton of goods 30 miles inland as it cost to bring a ton across the Atlantic. The person who would become the 16th president began his public career advocating canal construction in Illinois, and in 1849, before he became a prosperous railroad lawyer, he received U.S. patent 6469 for a device to facilitate boats’ passages over sandbars and shallow water.

Today, the nation needs somewhat increased infrastructure spending to increase productivity by reducing road and port congestions and boosting the velocity of economic activity. Unfortunately, this subject is not immune to the rhetorical extravagance that infects all of today’s political discourse.

Since the mid-1950s, public infrastructure spending “has generally tracked the growth of the U.S. economy.” In 2014, state and local governments made 62 percent of the nation’s capital expenditures and 88 percent of operations and maintenance for transportation and water infrastructure. Federal spending on highways has been declining since the Interstate Highway System was mostly completed, but at the end of 2016, municipal bond issues to finance infrastructure were the highest in history, more than double the 1996 level. And although the construction industry and unions might disagree, not everything ever built merits maintenance in perpetuity.

The last surge of infrastructure spending, in the Obama administration’s stimulus, taught a useful lesson: Because of the ever-thickening soup of regulations, there are no “shovel-ready” projects.

Bipartisanship, the absence of which is lamented until its recurrence reminds us of its costs, this month produced the budget agreement. It put the nation on a path to trillion-dollar deficits during brisk economic growth and full employment. So, Democrats face a disagreeable decision. They tend to regret private-sector involvement that taints the purity of government’s undertakings. Democrats might, however, have to embrace public-private partnerships that generate revenue streams for investors. That is, Democrats, whose euphemism for government spending is “investments,” might have to tolerate real ones.