I just came back from a 2 week vacation - we drove some 3500 miles to visit family and see some of the country we haven't been to before.
Along the way I thought about the highway system. In my opinion, it's one of the things that makes this a great country. We have not just the freedom to move around, but the means as well. The Interstate system is a marvelous (I know, we don't call things marvelous anymore) system. There were a few toll roads, but it was mostly free, except of course for gas taxes. When I needed a break, there were rest stops. When I wanted a longer break, there were federal parks and forests to enjoy. There were also state and local parks and activities - and many were either free or inexpensive. We enjoyed the The Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway, the St. Louis Zoo (free admission) and more - even the Veteran's Cemetery where my Dad is.
The roads were mostly safe, because they are mostly regulated. Speed is controlled, of course - but there are also consistent safety designs, signage, lane usage, truck regulations, design standards, maintenance standards and more. I always had GPS available to know where I was, where I was going and how to get there.
The point, of course, is that I was able to enjoy the fruits of decades of government investment in infrastructure. It is an invaluable national resource. Now we have an economic choice - we can disinvest, maintain or continue to build on what we have.
We can disinvest - stop spending and let what we have deteriorate or even privatize it to take government money back out of the system. We can probably do this for a long time before we realize what we've lost, and at the same time feel pretty good about the budget savings. Over time however, we will lose what we have and may never be able to get it back. And that would be a terrible loss.
A second alternative is to maintain what we have and keep enough government money flowing into the system to keep it at the current level. That's a better choice, but not much better. The Interstates are fine for today, but they probably will not meet future needs in 2050 or 2100. Even this much investment, however, seems to be under attack by the GOP.
An even better choice is to keep building new infrastructure. Not just highways, although I'm not sure what else we might need fifty or more years from now. It might be high speed rail, or a smart energy grid. It might be a nationwide fiber optic network, or even a national satellite communication network. Today's front page talked about space and the fact that we no longer have orbital lift capability for manned flight - maybe that's the next new infrastructure. We might build a national medical records system and a network of health care clinics. Whatever the goals, we need to value national investment programs and give them a high priority in our budgets
Many things can and should be built as "for-profit" investments driven by the free market. The Interstates were not built this way, and I cannot visualize any corporation undertaking projects of that size and scope for private gain. It's just something that we all need but no one person or corporation will have the motivation to do on their own. States probably cannot do it either - and even if they did, a patchwork of independent state roads would never match the Interstate system. We were on good state roads at times - and they just don't measure up to the Interstates.
And one more thought for those who believe that as entrepreneurs, they don't need or want government assistance. On our trip, we passed through the intersection of I57 and I70 at Effingham, IL. From there, you can easily reach the entire eastern half of the country. There is a big Fed Ex distribution center there - probably hundreds of trucks parked during the day as their inbound cargo was being sorted and reloaded on outbound trucks for that night's shipments out. Any company that ships anything by truck - inbound materials our outbound finished product, either by Fed Ex, UPS, USPS or private truckers - uses the government Interstate infrastructure every day.
We have a clear budget choice in the 2012 elections - lower taxes and austerity budgets on one hand, or government spending and the tax policy to support it on the other hand. All it takes is a simple road trip to see what is at stake.