- What Crumbling Infrastructure?!

Why exactly do I keep hearing liberals talking about how vital to our future it is to increase government spending on infrastructure? I drive, I fly. I use electricity and phones and water. And when I do, I don’t see any appreciable crumbling of our infrastructure. Newark and environs looks pretty bad but not meaningfully worse than it has at any other time since the 60’s. The rest of the state looks as good as I can ever remember. I even did the “geriatric commute” this past summer, driving from here to south Florida and back. The roads looked awfully good the whole way, as did virtually all of the rest stops.

In my new job I’ve been driving and flying outside the greater NY area too, and to be perfectly frank I’m surprised at how good everything looks. Airports that I remember as being schlocky 70’s concrete where depressing unionized food service workers would grudgingly sell you a $36 burger and fries like you’d get at a ballpark, have all been renovated. Now they’re all well lit tastefully carpeted plaza’s where you can get a Starbucks coffee or a burger from Chili’s for the same price that you’d pay for it anywhere else. The roads in the rest of the country, apart from being devoid of traffic compared to NJ, are the same quality as our high speed interstates. They’re even better than the ones in Brooklyn and Queens because those are so much older and narrower.

So where exactly is this big infrastructure crisis anyway? I’m beginning to think we’re all being had.

In NJ we have two kinds of construction jobs. The unionized kind where everyone involved works for the government, and the private sector kind where virtually all the employees comes from Guatemala, Nicaragua, or southern Mexico. Democrats see both lazy unionized civil servants and incredibly hard working but relatively low paid illegal aliens as constituency groups. So I always figured the call to arms for more needless infrastructure spending was really just more of the same old ‘feed my union’ scamming. But when you get out of greater NY, the union membership drops precipitously, so there is really no ‘pay to play’ benefit to politicians outside the northeastern ‘union belt’. So why do they support this visibly needless nonsense?

Could it actually be that our ‘infrastructure crisis’ is no more real than man made global warming? (Believe what you want about global warming, but I analyze data like that for a living and I’ve seen the actual data so you aren’t fooling me.)

I don’t have any hard data on the infrastructure issue because it’s so local and is therefore hard to aggregate. The only justifications I’ve ever heard have been individual cases. But I’ve had great luck over the years at using my personal experience to drive decision making. You get a great sweater at the Gap and it seems crowded, buy Gap stock. You see lots of new cars in the parking lot you buy Ford or Toyota or whatever.

And my personal experience with the infrastructure in America is that it’s actually really great. There are no high speed rails, but I wouldn’t ride the thing anyway so what do I care? They never did make any economic sense.

I’ll hold off until I hear from the rest of you on this issue before I make up my mind, but I think all these cries for infrastructure might very well be nothing more than the Obama administration following through on the Roosevelt plan for getting the economy going, when they are constrained by political feasibility.

Infrastructure spending would not only support their key constituencies, but it follows a narrative than even dim witted liberals can track. You know how liberals love a good story. And they’re always prepared to believe one that matches their preconceived biases whether it’s true or not. To them if Roosevelt did it, then it must be helpful, so it makes sense they would support this all over again. Don’t be surprised if in the next few years they start demanding that we go to war against Germany and Japan (or maybe China given the demographics.)

Unless contradicted by massive reports of first person observation, I’m going to start believing that this great infrastructure crisis is no more than that… a good story.