Roads

Speaking at the “America Answers: Improving How We Get From Here To There” event hosted by the Washington Post, Vice President Joe Biden used a downright angry tone as he scorned the U.S. for scrimping on infrastructure spending. This comes in the shadow of a report suggesting that America must increase infrastructure spending by $3.6 trillion before 2020 to be up to par.

The Senate is set to take up legislation to keep federal highway money flowing to states, with just three days left before the government plans to start slowing down payments. The House passed a $10.8 billion bill last week that would pay for highway and transit aid through the end of May 2015 if transportation spending is maintained at current levels.

The U.S. deficit is down more than 50 percent from what President Bush left behind, projections of the rise in medical costs that drove future deficits are way down, the “intellectual foundation” that justified the push for cutting government has collapsed, and the European experiment has shown that budget cuts really just make things worse. Meanwhile, we have two real problems to worry about: unemployment and crumbling infrastructure. Can we finally hire people to fix things?

Over the weekend, a national conversation about our nation’s decaying infrastructure finally became audible in the wake of a bridge collapse in Washington state. At the heart of the matter is America’s need to increase infrastructure spending by any means available: congressional loans; an infrastructure bank; and/or incentivizing private-public investments, to name a few.