The Infrastructure Crisis (Civil Engineering Magazine)

... The fact that the infrastructure has not been a national priority is evident from key economic data. From 1950 to 1970, for example, the United States devoted 3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to infrastructure spending; since 1980, however, spending on infrastructure has been cut by a third, to just 2 percent of GDP, notes Sherle R. Schwenninger, the New York City–based director of the economic growth program of the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank. The result has been a huge shortfall of needed investments, explains Schwenninger. ...

At present, infrastructure spending often gets crowded out by “other pressing expenditures that are more day to day” in the federal government’s annual budgetary fights, notes the New America Foundation’s Schwenninger, who wrote about the need for a capital budget in Ten Big Ideas for a New America, a report issued by that group in February 2007. But a capital budget would end these battles over distinguishing a capital expenditure from an operating expense and enable the nation to spread the costs of capital improvements over time rather than delay such investments to keep within annual budgetary limits, Schwenninger explains. more