For most of America’s history, the vast majority of infrastructure was paid for at the state and local levels. A lot of it, like our power grid, was developed privately. The idea that somehow without enormous Federal spending we won’t have highways, bridges, sewers, and everything else is bloody nuts. Infrastructure is not a Federal responsibility, with some exceptions like the interstate highway system. Granted, states are only too happy to feed off the Federal trough instead of pay for things themselves, but that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.

Number Two: the idea that all of a sudden our “infrastructure” is going to hell — bridges usually being the prime example — doesn’t stand up either.

Here’s a chart on bridges:

The famous collapsed bridge in Minnesota was a design deficiency. Ironically, it was being repaired at the time it went down.

Number Three: We can’t borrow our way out of everything, no matter what the damn interest rate is. At some point, somebody is going to want to see some real money — you know, the “principal” — and kicking it down the road another few years is what everybody did a few years ago. It’s already hitting the fan.

Your comment makes it clear you did not read the article

After all, the Party gets a nice cut of that, too.

Sell the suckers more of our phoney paper. Sounds ever so much better than encouraging a political environment where real wealth can be created again. Screw the private sector. Who needs revenues anyway when we’ve got this great credit card?

Remember why Madoff was thrown in jail?

Klein is a liberal Democrat who also knows something about economics. As with Krugman, the combination is destroying his brain.

This is what California has been doing, you know. Endless bonds to buy goodies. Some bond issue shows up in every election. It’s “free money” as far as the State government is concerned, and unfortunately, as far as many voters are concerned, too.

The Democrats have demonstrated that their entire economic plan is “tax and spend,” and if they can’t tax, they’ll damn well spend anyway. Inflation? Deficits? Debt? Who cares, unless we can use those to attack Republicans?

“In Washington, 2011 was all about dangers posed by America’s deficits. Republicans said deficit reduction was priority number one. Democrats mostly went along. But in the markets, the story was precisely the opposite. As Daniel Kruger reports in Bloomberg, demand for American debt was stronger in 2011 than in any year since 1995. It’s cheaper for the U.S. to finance its debt today than it was when we last had surpluses. For all that Washington is sure we’re borrowing too much, the signal from the markets is that we’re borrowing too little, that they wish we would borrow more.

This is not, to be fair, a bet on America’s economic strength. It’s a judgment about the rest of the world’s economic weakness. U.S. Treasuries are what savvy investors buy when they’re in a canned-goods-and-ammunition sort of mood and they think gold is overvalued. But though that makes the demand we’re seeing more depressing, it doesn’t make it any less real.

The Treasury Department keeps track of something called “Daily Treasury Real Yield Curve Rates.” It’s the actual rate — the one that takes into account expected inflation — at which the United States can borrow. And something amazing has happened to it in the past year. For three-year, five-year, and 10-year treasuries, the rate has turned negative. That is to say, the market is so afraid of losing money in the dangerous, uncertain world out there, that they’ll pay us to keep their money safe for them.

That’s a sad commentary on the state of the global economy. But it’s an incredible opportunity for us. It means that any investment with any positive rate of return is an investment worth making. Infrastructure clearly fits that bill. Not only is the likely return high, but if we don’t do it now, we’ll need to do it later, when our borrowing costs will be higher.

But the conventional wisdom — the wisdom that says the only responsible thing to do is cut — stands in our way. If we were going by the numbers, the path forward would be clear: Borrow now, when we can get money for free, when we have millions of unemployed Americans to put back to work, and when the economy is in desperate need of more demand. But don’t stop there. At the same time, pass a large and credible deficit-reduction plan that covers, says, 2014-2023, and cuts federal borrowing as the global economy recovers and interest rates rise. in other words, make investments now, when it’s cheap, but begin working on an exit strategy for a few years from now, when borrowing becomes expensive again.

I was here when Bush’s deficit hit $400 billion. It was like hearing a banshee chorus.

And this is just one of dozens of examples. Things that were “core issues” a few years ago that suddenly just aren’t part of the picture any more.

The guy you voted for has added more to the debt in one term than Bush — who added a hell of a lot himself — managed in two. And who cares? As far as the Democrats are concerned, the Obama administration started in January of 2011, and only the Republicans have kept him from performing all the miracles he promised.

Attacking the energy industry, raising taxes, exploding the number of regulations, ratcheting government spending to amazing new heights?

Must have missed that. And all in one year, too.

ER makes my point for me.

“Down With the Bosses.”

Just one graphic:

I’m trying to imagine you, with a Republican president, going “hey, it’s cool. It’s just like a “mortgage.”

But if you’re going to go with that metaphor, it’s a mortgage where the payer is using a credit card to make payments.

Deficit last year was well over 1 trillion dollars.

I wouldn’t expect most people to have a hard time imagining an accurate analogy. Sovereign debt even with a slightly-diminished rating comes with primo terms that any homeowner would kill for, so comparison to loanshark-grade credit card debt is also pretty misleading.

–Your ever-faithful fact-checker,
Robert