Federal infrastructure spending is a bad deal: Trump should choose privatization over nationalization.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: ECONOMICS

IN HIS FIRST address as president-elect, Donald Trump repeated his campaign promise to invest in America's infrastructure. "We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals," he said. "We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it."

His plan is for the federal government to entice private investors with $137 billion in tax credits. The idea is that this will unleash up to $1 trillion worth of infrastructure investment over 10 years, spur economic growth, and create countless American jobs.

Politicians' love affair with infrastructure spending isn't new. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and many before them have paid their respects to the idea. Economists have long recognized that roads, bridges, airports, and canals are the conduits through which goods are exchanged, and as such, infrastructure can play a productive role in economic growth.

But not all infrastructure spending is equal. Ample literature shows, in fact, that it's a particularly bad vehicle for stimulus and does not, in practice, boost short-term jobs or economic growth. To work that way, government spending would have to be used quickly to put the unemployed to work on shovel-ready projects. But as Obama discovered in 2009 when he tried to spend $47 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on infrastructure, there aren't that many shovel-ready projects lying around. And since job seekers rarely have the skills needed to start building a bridge or highway right away, employers are forced to poach workers from their existing jobs.

Publicly funded infrastructure projects often aren't good investments in the long term, either. Most spending orchestrated by the federal government suffers from terrible incentives that lead to malinvestment--resources wasted in inefficient ways and on low-priority efforts. Projects get approved for political reasons and are either totally unnecessary or harmed by cost overruns and corruption. For example, we know that infrastructure investment produces the highest returns when it supports already-expanding cities and regions. Yet politicians' tendency is to spend in declining areas, where dollars can't help as many people, such as Detroit and Cleveland.

Government statistics show that our infrastructure isn't actually crumbling. While...