"...Ample literature shows, in fact, that it's a particularly bad vehicle for stimulus and does not, in practice, boost short-term jobs or economic growth.
To work that way, government spending would have to be used quickly to put the unemployed to work on shovel-ready projects.But as Obama discovered in 2009 when he tried to spend $47 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on infrastructure, there aren't that many shovel-ready projects lying around. And since job seekers rarely have the skills needed to start building a bridge or highway right away, employers are forced to poach workers from their existing jobs.
Publicly funded infrastructure projects often aren't good investments in the long term, either.
Most spending orchestrated by the federal government suffers from terrible incentives that lead to malinvestment—resources wasted in inefficient ways and on low-priority efforts.
Projects get approved for political reasons and are either totally unnecessary or harmed by cost overruns and corruption.
For example, we know that infrastructure investment produces the highest returns when it supports already-expanding cities and regions.
Yet politicians' tendency is to spend in declining areas, where dollars can't help as many people, such as Detroit and Cleveland.
Government statistics show that our infrastructure isn't actually crumbling..."
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