Nine reasons to invest more in the nation’s infrastructure

Last week, President Obama spoke in Ohio and pressed Congress to boost federal investment in the nation’s infrastructure. This serves as a great time to reiterate all the reasons why boosting infrastructure investments is a no-brainer:

1)  Our infrastructure is terrible. More than one in four bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, indicating that the Minnesota bridge collapse wasn’t an isolated event. The American Society of Civil Engineers conclude that we need to double our investment in surface transportation infrastructure just to keep it from literally crumbling beneath our feet.

2)  Win the future. Public investments such as infrastructure are vital to long-run economic growth and fuel higher incomes and living standards for decades. A recent and comprehensive review of the literature on this topic finds that a sustained 1 percent increase in public capital growth rate translates into a 0.6 percentage-point increase in the private-sector GDP growth rate.

There’s an even stronger case for doing it now:

3)  It creates jobs. Regular readers of this blog won’t need to be reminded that millions of Americans are still suffering under the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. Job creationh as become an economic, political, and moral imperative. Infrastructure investments create jobs now, when we need them most.

4)  A LOT of jobs. Infrastructure creates 16 percent more than a payroll tax holiday, nearly 40 percent more than an across-the-board tax cut, and over five times as many as temporary business tax cuts. We need to squeeze as much job creation out of each dollar of cost, and infrastructure certainly passes the test.

Read the full article and reasons 5 through 9 by ETHAN POLLACK at EPI.org

Economic policy tends to be pretty complex stuff, but this is a BIG exception. We need infrastructure work, we need jobs, the price is low, and we’re being given nearly free money to do it. All we lack is the political will.

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