Spending Won’t Fix What Ails U.S. Infrastructure

President Barack Obama’s announcement yesterday of a six-year, $476 billion surface transportation reauthorization bill, as part of his 2013 budget, is the latest demonstration of a longstanding presidential propensity for transportation projects.

The U.S. owes its emergence as a great power to magnificent investments in infrastructure. The emerging giant of today, China (TBBLCHNA), is following that example. Many imagine that we must again build big to stay on top. But success in middle-age -- for people and nations -- requires wisdom and cunning more than pumped-up brawn. America’s infrastructure needs intelligent reform, not floods of extra financing or quixotic dreams of new moon adventures or high-speed railways to nowhere.

When the U.S. was new, it had a hinterland with seemingly unlimited natural resources that was virtually inaccessible to the population centers of the East and the markets of the Old World. It cost as much to move goods 30 miles over land as to ship them across the Atlantic. Our first leaders dreamed of building waterways that would open the West; George Washington founded the Potomac Canal Company before he became president. The Erie Canal was a wonder of the age, running 363 miles and paying for itself within a decade.

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