We're having major debates right now in the US over whether or not the federal government should invest into infrastructure at all and how much it should invest

We're having major debates right now in the US over whether or not the federal government should invest into infrastructure at all and how much it should invest, and to phrase that as "nobody wants to work" is utterly backwards. Nobody wants to pay to maintain bridges, and whenever we try to set up funds to pay for fixing bridges, it gets funneled towards grifters because of an equal mix of privatization/government corruption/lack of transparency. You can look at a lot of infrastructure through this lens. Why is our Internet so far behind other countries? Is it because of a lack of workers? No, it's because of a mixture of monopolies, government capture, and both over and under regulation. We make it hard to invest in Internet infrastructure without serious effort from lawmakers and companies, meanwhile we don't regulate the companies that we are funneling public funds to. We give money to Comcast to set up Internet connections, and it doesn't do it, and then we give them more money instead of punishing them. Meanwhile, the very notion of improving this infrastructure is itself political and constantly debated. At best, our infrastructure projects are rolled up into an increasingly dysfunctional political system where parties are purely interested in maintaining power and opposing each other. Add onto that an unhealthy dose of individualism that teaches us that people shouldn't be paying to maintain common infrastructure and that asking them to do so is theft. This take is also really disconnected from the reality of gig-workers and factory workers (and out-of-work individuals) across America, including in Seattle. It is not the case that everyone is privileged enough to not work and therefore we have a shortage because too many of them are making art. There is a large population of people in the US who feel forced into oppressive jobs, and companies literally rely on their desperation in order to maintain an underpaid workforce. We have willing workers in America, but a nontrivial number of them are trapped working for Uber and fighting off homelessness. What does it say about government spending, about the barriers of entry to doing other work, and about the amount of resources we're devoting to infrastructure in general that those people can't get better paying jobs than Uber? It's just so out of touch to act like the potential workforce begins and ends with programmers/artists. Get out of the tech bubble and talk to normal people; the reason Seattle isn't paying to fix potholes is not because there is no one left to fix the pothole, and it is definitely not the worker's fault that they haven't done their civic duty to push blue-collar market wages down far enough.