When a bridge falls in America -- like this one near Seattle on Thursday night -- infrastructure spending has a way of transforming from a fringey bugaboo to A1 national obsession. Fortunately, falling bridges in America are still a rarity. Unfortunately, infrastructure spending is being unnecessarily squeezed by sequestration and the incredible shrinking discretionary budget at the very moment that infrastructure spending is a historic bargain for the federal government.



Public construction spending has been declining since the middle of the recession in outright terms ...



... and as a share of the economy, it's at a 20-year low (the lowest on record with St Louis Fed data).



Our construction budget has been the victim of deficit fears, but it's the infrastructure deficit that's truly absurd.





Our expensive transportation and utility challenges absolutely aren't going away, but our window of opportunity to cheaply fix them absolutely will. Roads, rail, airports, broadband, electrical grids ... repairing or building out these systems is a matter of inevitability and U.S. interest rates and labor costs will only go up as the economy recovers.



The average age of America's 607,380 bridges is about 42 years old. The Federal Highway Administrations claims we'll need to spend about $20.5 billion annually for the next 16 years to properly update them -- about 60 percent more than we're spending every year today. Meanwhile, the Highway Trust Fund has been slammed by a decrease in miles driven nationally, states and cities have been slammed by the weak economy, and private builders face a jumbled knot of "municipalities, investors, and federal overseers."