Nov 9, 2015 4 min read

In the dog days of 2009 and 2010, when the economy was in a slump unlike any the United States had experienced since the Great Depression, money for infrastructure spending was part of a stimulus measure shepherded into law by President Obama and a majority-Democratic Congress in order to try to jolt a moribund economy back to life.

It was better than nothing, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t good enough. The United States should have spent more – much, much more – on infrastructure at that moment.

It’s a point that Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman harps on with some frequency, and his exasperation is understandable. A large-scale infrastructure program when the economy ran out of gas would have put people back to work, prepared us for future economic growth and been significantly less costly in comparison to its price tag in more prosperous times, since interest rates were exceptionally low and contractors would have almost certainly submitted very low bids in order to get work.

Sitting on our hands made no sense. But that, to an extent, is what we did when policymakers decided to not pour any more money into stimulating the economy and focus instead on deficit reduction. We’ll be paying for it, since the economy has at long last improved and interest rates seem certain to inch up, perhaps within the next month or two. And, as a story in the Friday edition of The New York Times pointed out, our crumbling infrastructure has cost us more than dollars and cents – it has cost us lives.

Start, for instance, with South Carolina. During recent floods there, 36 dams collapsed. Some of the dams were a century old. However, the state apparently put only a nominal effort into inspecting them. Nineteen people died in the floods, and some observers are blaming the deficient dams.

Then there are the bridges that you might want to tread across carefully. Everyone felt a chill when a highway bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in August 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145 others. All those deaths and injuries were the result of happenstance and, ultimately, neglect. Eight years later, over 60,000 bridges in the United States remain structurally deficient, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are unsafe, but that they are in need of renovation and repair. In Pennsylvania, there are a little over 5,000 structurally deficient bridges, the most of any state in the country. Back in 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the commonwealth’s overall infrastructure a C-minus grade, reserving grades of “D” for bridges, roads, transit and drinking water.

The aging pipelines under our streets that carry oil and natural gas are also in need of an upgrade. In February 2011, five people were killed and eight homes destroyed when one of those lines ruptured in Allentown. Again, those lives were lost and those properties destroyed as a result of happenstance and neglect. Pennsylvania’s U.S. Sen. Bob Casey told the Times, “Most of (the pipelines) are buried underneath the streets so it’s not something people see every day and worry about. But we ignore them at our peril.”

When Americans go abroad, they often marvel at the smooth roads and smoothly operating public transporation systems they find, particularly in parts of Europe and Asia. The quality of the infrastructure in those places didn’t happen as a result of luck or sorcery. It happened because investments were made. We need to do the same thing here.