...Taxpayers' generosity toward the nation's infrastructure, however, took a dive during the 1980s. President Reagan's aversion to using taxes for domestic spending, exacerbated by Wall Street's obsession with quarterly earnings, encouraged a shortsightedness in assessing the public good. According to
Sherle R. Schwenninger, the director of the
New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program, the money that government at all levels has devoted to infrastructure, as a proportion of the nation's total economic output, slipped from 3 percent during the 1950s and 1960s to only 2 percent in recent years...
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