It seems to me that the US struggles not with spending levels on infrastructure, but with correct allocation. There's not enough focus on high throughput, high

It seems to me that the US struggles not with spending levels on infrastructure, but with correct allocation. There's not enough focus on high throughput, high value trunks, because we throw far too much money at the environmental and cultural scourge that is the many-laned, unlimited access 45 mph roads frequently punctuated with stop lights. It's true that there's that ASCE report from a few years back that decries how woefully underfunded our infrastructure is. But it also shows absurd things, like that we need to spend an extra 4.3 trillion on surface roads to save 3 trillion in potentially lost GDP over the next 25 years. The next most troublesome category of infrastructure from a funding gap perspective seems to be wastewater (~75% unfunded, but far smaller), which also stems from our failure to keep people in sufficiently dense development patterns. Going back to the issue at hand, with the inland waterway: the same report puts the economic cost of underfunding waterways at half that of underfunding surface roads. But the underfunding for waterways is 2 orders of magnitude lower than that for surface roads... American infrastructure policy is akin to a dog perishing in a house fire because it's too busy chasing its own tail to step out the open front door. I highly encourage people to think about page 5 of this ASCE report (http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016-FTA-Report-Close-the-Gap.pdf http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2...) and ponder the disparities.