Brookings’ Cliff Winston on Infrastructure

President Joe Biden is planning a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure and jobs package to spur transformative change to the economy. Unfortunately, the infrastructure component of his plan will fail to significantly improve the nation’s roads, bridges, and the like because it ignores the vast inefficiencies in current transportation policy that greatly reduce benefits from infrastructure spending.

Let me take you on the journey of a dollar of government spending intended to improve, for example, travel conditions on a highway. This dollar will have a long, perilous trip and encounter many dangers enroute that will divert it from its correct destination and take large, wasteful chunks out of it. By the time it reaches the wrong destination, it will fund much less than a dollar’s worth of highway improvements. The dangers it encounters include inefficient road pricing and investment policy, inflated input and project costs, misallocation of highway revenues, and the slow adoption of technological innovations.

This is from Clifford Winston, “How Federal Infrastructure Dollars Get Nickeled and Dimed,” Barron’s, March 24, 2021.

I highly recommend the whole piece. Actually, everything I’ve ever read by Cliff has been at least good and usually great.

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