The Collapse Of Public Infrastructure Spending In One Chart
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The big news today is that a bridge in Washington collapsed, throwing cars into the water. Amazingly, nobody died.
This may revive debate about the need to spend more on infrastructure, which would have multiple positive effects.
Nothing is likely to happen, however.
That being said, here's a chart of public construction spending (TLPBLCONS) as percentage of GDP.
You can see, public construction spending is lower than its been in over 20 years.
http://www.businessinsider.com/skagit-bridge-collapse-infrastructure-spending-2013-5#ixzz2UEYXhAMb
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This chart it as a % of GDP, and then focuses on a very tight scale to amplify any change. The fact is that the spending has been a little under 2% of GDP, and of course the number goes up during a recession because what happens to GDP during a recession?
Right, GDP goes down, or at least stops growing.
I would be interested in seeing the total infrastructure spending, not normalized to GDP. I doubt that we would see such a reduction, mainly because so much of the infrastructure spending is funded by gas taxes.
And that opens up another kettle of fish. One of the real successes of the Obama years, which nobody talks about, is a huge improvement in the MPG that cars are getting. This has been the main factor in a leveling off of gasoline consumption.
We have more cars than ever beating up the infrastructure, but we are paying less fuel tax to fund the road maintenance.
