Investing In Infrastructure

Robert Frank and P.J. O'Rourke agree that we ought to invest in infrastructure while interest rates are low and construction workers are unemployed (h/t Mark Thoma):

And to delay infrastructure expenditure is to inflate it. For example, take a badly worn stretch of Interstate 80 in Nevada. The state's Department of Transportation says fixing it today would cost $6 million, but waiting two years would cause the roadbed to be so degraded by traffic and weather that the price would rise fivefold, to $30 million.

That's probably an underestimate. Many construction workers are currently unemployed and equipment is idle. Two years from now, putting them to work on I-80 will mean bidding them away from other jobs. Furthermore, construction materials are cheap at the moment and interest rates are at record lows.

Another example is a pair of bottlenecks in the Northeast rail corridor. Low clearances block flatcars from carrying double-decker shipping containers. The containers go by truck instead, mostly on I-95, now bumper-to-bumper day and night. Other trucks use I-81, which is also congested and adds 200-some miles to the trip. According to a study commissioned by the I-95 Corridor Coalition, the bottlenecks could be eliminated for a cost equal to half the resulting multibillion-dollar savings. And those savings don't include reductions in noise, air pollution and the number of furious drivers with beet-red faces stuck for hours in traffic.

Here is our proposal: Have Congress create a 12-person bipartisan jury of eminent — or even half-bright — citizens. Give this panel authority to decide which of the American Society of Civil Engineers' projects should not be begun right away. Greenlight all the rest, and with luck most will get done before the Chinese decide they're tired of buying our 10-year T-bills at 1.7%. In contrast to the desperately overdue maintenance projects that our proposed committee would identify, the stimulus bill passed in 2009 actually didn't have all that much infrastructure in it, and a lot of what it did have was new pork projects that were far from shovel-ready.

Man, the freight rail improvements are a no-brainer.  Unfortunately, the loony right will block more infrastructure investment because they don't want government doing anything constructive.