I expect there will be a lot of skeptical reaction to this, so I'll just encourage readers to read through the whole article (and subsequent articles, if you fi

I expect there will be a lot of skeptical reaction to this, so I'll just encourage readers to read through the whole article (and subsequent articles, if you find this one intriguing), with an open mind. Specifically, the most important TLDR is that we are not actually suffering from an infrastructure crisis because we spend less on infrastructure than we did in the past, but because we have so much to maintain that even a historic massive capital program like the American Jobs plan is nowhere near enough to fix the maintenance backlog. The money for maintenance should be coming from local revenue that the infrastructure is generating, but most of our infrastructure is in rural and sparse suburban areas and generating little to no return on the investment, so local governments can't afford to maintain it all. If we want to truly fix American infrastructure, we should be looking to triage our maintenance backlog, let go of old infrastructure that doesn't generate a positive return, and consolidate our investments around projects that generate more in tax revenue (over time) than the amortized capital cost of the infrastructure AND its ongoing lifetime maintenance.