The government is spending money on infrastructure, it's just not very good infrastructure. You can open up any state's department of transportation website an

The government is spending money on infrastructure, it's just not very good infrastructure. You can open up any state's department of transportation website and find billions of dollars worth of ongoing projects for widening roads. These are not the projects people dream about, but they do satisfy the people that are invested in the suburbs. A lot of advocacy revolves around "live in a dense urban core, work in a dense urban core, and travel to other dense urban cores", and people just aren't doing that, so it does make some sense that politicians with 2 year terms aren't champing at the bit to do those projects instead of "widen congested freeway" (even though we know that never solves the problem).