America Crumbling

You’ve heard the promises for years, even decades: Politicians looking to win office blare at the top of their lungs that they will fix America’s crumbling infrastructure. Then, crickets.

Action never seems to follow the promises, partly because politicians divert road monies to other pet projects. Now federal funding for roads, bridges, railroads, airports, and even hospitals and schools is at a dangerously low-level.

President Obama was one of those who made the promise to shore up our infrastructure, as a key part of his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. But while he’s spent lots of money, there’s little to show for it.

So says, among others, Lawrence Summers, an economist and president emeritus of Harvard University and Obama’s own former director of the United States National Economic Council.

“We’re not net investing at all,” Summers said during a Feb. 19 keynote address at Princeton University’s Julius-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance. “Can that possibly make sense, given the demand issues, given the productivity of public investment, and given that … deferring maintenance is just … passing the burden onto [the next generation].”

Federal spending on roads, bridges and tunnels has fallen almost 9 percent since 2004, with current spending now slightly below $200 billion. That’s only 0.012 percent of annual national income, or $670 per American.

That low funding means thousands of bridges and thousands of miles of highway, plus many airports and other structures, are degrading faster than federal and state work crews can repair, rebuild or replace.

While those needs go unmet, pet projects pushed by political powerhouses seem to attract precious public dollars with ease.

In California, Democrats have launched a $70-billion plan to build a supposedly high-speed rail route from Los Angeles to San Francisco — billions that could go to clear the $59-billion backlog of infrastructure projects already on the books. A business-backed group, the National Transportation Research Group, says a third of the state’s major roads are in poor condition.

Related: States Test Anti-Gridlock Plans

Federal taxpayers will be paying for much of the California railroad — $13 billion in the first decade of operation, $42 billion in later decades, according to a 2011 estimate by California officials.

Back then, the project was estimated to cost $98 billion, so politicians and lobbyists for labor unions and railroad companies decided to run the high-speed train part of the way over low-speed train tracks. That move promised to save $30 billion, but it further reduces any incentive for people to take the four-hour,$100 train ride. In comparison, it costs only $60 for a 90-minute flight from airport to airport.

Many priorities the public prefers are often underfunded.

After allocating those billions of dollars to the railroad track, California legislators are now pushing a new tax on motorists to help repair the roads.

“I feel like we pay enough in taxes,” Californian Mark Darnell told a local TV station in February. “If they would just use the money more wisely, they could maintain the roads.”

The priorities that get the cash are the ones most strongly backed by coalitions of politicians, construction companies and construction labor unions.

Take Amtrak, for example. Following a mid-May crash of a New York City-bound Amtrak train north of Philadelphia, the rail service became a front-page political fodder for Democrats and  lobbyists who want a bigger federal subsidy for Amtrak’s rail line between New York and Washington, D.C.

But the Amtrak crash was not caused by any lack of federal spending. The train crashed apparently because the operator drove it at 100-miles per hour into a 50 mile-per-hour curve. Human failure happens even as the federal government provided $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ funds to the rail service in 2014.

Many priorities the public prefers are often underfunded in favor of projects that benefit a few:

• $532,000 was spent to beautify one city block in a tiny Kansas town of just more than 1,100 residents.
• $150,000 in yearly funding goes to an Oklahoma airport that handles one flight per month.
• $142,000 was spent to give rides to Super Bowl attendees.

Granted, that’s not a lot of money when you consider there are some 60,000 structurally deficient bridges, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

“Congress has created so much uncertainty in the marketplace with 32 short-term funding extensions that state transportation departments have little choice but to delay or cancel scheduled highway and transit improvement projects every year,” ARTBA President Pete Ruane said in a statement published on the association’s website. “This, in turn, jeopardizes private sector jobs and makes capital investment and hiring decisions more risky.”

The lobbying groups may be right. But even if Congress hands out more cash, there’s little expectation the funding will be used to help Americans instead of politicians, donors and labor unions.

After the $900-billion stimulus binge-spend was passed in 2009, a 2012 inspector’s general report found the government would have saved billions by simply getting more than one bid for so-called “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects.

“We project with 90 percent confidence that the overall average price difference between contracts with 1 or 2 bids and those with 3 bids is at least $179 million,” the IG’s report said.

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