For the past four decades, there's been a steady stream of dire warnings that our "crumbling infrastructure" needs a massive influx of federal spending to survive.  Those massive new investments never arrived.  Get a load of the list of such maneuvers in this piece by John Merline at Investor's Business Daily, here.  It's an amazing list.

What he found is that government spending on infrastructure as a share of the economy has barely changed in 30 years.  It's flat, at around 2.5%, not bigger, not smaller, moving exactly with the direction of the U.S. economy.  And the infrastructure it was supposed to upgrade never actually crumbled.  In fact, when the Democrats were last in power and controlled the infrastructure-is-crumbling narrative, they went and spent all the stimulus cash for the supposed shovel-ready jobs – on municipal pension obligations and other things to beef up the bureaucracies.

This, to Democrats, is the real priority, of course.

It turns out that these endless warnings are little more than a way for politicians to avoid making hard choices; enforce accountability; or find new and more efficient ways to maintain our roads, bridges, etc.  Just think of Nancy Pelosi and all her go-big infrastructure spending talk, back when she was the newly minted speaker of the House in 2006.

What we have here is a whole lot of money-shoveling for pet projects under the rallying cry of infrastructure spending.  Turns out the feds have little to do with it, according to the IBD piece.  But it sure does serve as a useful vehicle for squeezing that much more money out of the taxpayers.