The U.S. has neglected its infrastructure for decades and is falling apart. Unemployment and inequality are high, and people are hurting. Real interest rates are negative, there is virtually no risk of inflation, and the U.S. dollar remains strong and stable for the near future. Warm up the printing presses and helicopters! Don’t take it from me, take it from Larry Summers, who is normally in the headlines for cautioning against this sort of thing:

we propose a crude way to take account of this by excluding a specific set of programs and investments from the constraints of pay-as-you-go when strong evidence from academic research implies they would plausibly pay for themselves in present value. This includes well-designed investments in areas like children, education, and research. Infrastructure would ideally be paid for with Pigouvian revenue measures that improve infrastructure utilization, but it too could get an exception to the pay-as-you-go principle.

a paper by Larry Summers and another guy you haven’t heard of

Under these conditions, just directing the fire hose of federal money at infrastructure projects, any infrastructure projects, can’t hurt. It might be good to do that rather than spend too much time coming up with a plan to do it the best possible way. And yet, it could be done better. We could take the time to plan when we are not in a crisis, and then be ready to turn on the taps when a crisis hits (or just crack the taps open to a slow drip when a minor challenge hits and we need to nudge the country back on course.)

Too many proposals about infrastructure just boil down to throwing money at pork barrel highway projects, or else a buzzword soup about things like sustainability and equity without specific proposals. Here is one new proposal from Rice University with some specifics. One thing they propose is that project proposals come from leaders at the metropolitan or regional scale rather than the federal government. I completely agree with this. They suggest focusing on transportation (including public transportation), public facilities (including health facilities and parks), water and wastewater, energy (including renewables), and communications (including broadband). They then get down to a laundry list of specific projects at the local scale that would benefit from funding. Pulling all of this together is a pretty good accomplishment.

These basic categories sound okay to me. I might leave “health facilities” out of it – the U.S. needs a comprehensive, universal health care system now and that is a big enough topic to deserve its own legislation and program. Education is similar. I might add housing. Housing is a huge topic and it is excluded from most definitions of public infrastructure, but it is so intertwined with infrastructure and land use that its problems almost need to be solved at the same time. I like that they included parks – I might broaden this to include other forms of green infrastructure like street trees. Maybe “green infrastructure” is a too buzzwordy term – nothing wrong with “parks and trees”, except maybe there is a gray area whether are talking about any type of park or recreation facility (an urban playground or basketball court?) or whether it has to be quasi-naturalistic. I think I would go with the broader definition. I might add “urban food infrastructure” to the list – this is somewhat nebulous, but again intertwined with the larger infrastructure system and land use issues. You don’t really want the ag industry lobbyists involved, hence the “urban” term.

A bunch of projects do not make a plan. A good plan needs to have a definition of the system that is being planned for, and measurable goals for the state or function of that system that is desired. Then any package of inter-related projects can be evaluated to see how well they meet the goals and at what cost. Then finally, a specific package of projects can be chosen and put in priority order, and funding and implementation details can be worked out. Lots of “plans” skip right to the last step I just mentioned, while others fail because the last two steps are not well enough thought out.

As far as goals, they should be set at the local level, but the basics are fairly obvious, I think:

• Provide reliable and affordable water, energy, communication, food and waste disposal services for everyone. (This can get wonkier – you want to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair, set and meet level of service goals, and minimize the cost of each component over its life cycle by making smart maintain/repair/replace/upgrade decisions.)
• Minimize the expense and time of moving people and goods where they need to go. (I think of this as infrastructure minimizing “friction” in the workings of the economy.)
• Minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts of the infrastructure system on the environment and public health, or if we want to be more buzzwordy, maximize ecosystem services.
• Make the transportation system as safe as possible for everyone. (You could roll this into either the transportation or health goals, but it is so near and dear to my heart I give it its own bullet. If we made this an explicit goal, we would not be designing our streets and highways the way we are today in the U.S. By the way, active commutes are very nice and a lot of people might like them if they had the option to give them a try.)
• Housing – I don’t know enough to articulate this. Basically, everybody needs to be able to afford a decent roof over their heads.
• Be prepared to react, manage, and recover from disasters and other disruptions that occur. The buzzword is resilience. (Climate change mostly fits under this goal. The words “climate change” are not a goal or a plan in and of themselves. Some bad things that happen are related to climate change, and some are just random bad luck, and some are mixes of the two. We need to be ready for all of them.)

A few more principles I think are important:

• The federal government could fund this planning at the metro scale. The planning itself would create some government, professional, and academic jobs and build technical capacity. Something similar is already done for transportation so it could be expanded. The plan would need to be on the books, with a goal-based analysis justifying a prioritized list of specific projects selected, to be eligible for federal funding.
• The funding should go from the federal government directly to metro areas, without passing through state politicians. Otherwise they will use the helicopters to scatter the money over rural areas where it will not do as much economic good or help as many people. States could be given a fair amount of money to plan and implement in areas unable or uninterested in doing it themselves.
• The metro region needs to have skin in the game. The federal government should match local investments – it could match at a higher or lower rate depending on economic conditions, but something short of 100%.
• Funding for maintenance needs to be included, and set aside in some sort of trust fund. This would need to include funding for existing infrastructure through the end of its service life, and then funding for new infrastructure to be maintained as it replaces the old. In fact, funding maintenance of existing infrastructure would be the single easiest way to benefit people and the economy right away without the considerable time and effort it takes to get new construction projects up and running. Maybe I’ll rethink my earlier proposal to leave out education, and include maintenance of public schools which would instantly improve the lives of millions of children, parents, teachers and staff. We could hit this hard and have a decent public school system in this country (again) by fall 2021.

So there’s my infrastructure plan. If you are a powerful politician reading this, please feel free to steal it and say you thought of it. My reward will be living in a decent, modern country with a growing economy and a pleasant environment.