Road to nowhere: we cannot dig, build, or pave our way out of economic malaise.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns - Column

"THERE IS NO MORE persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending," wrote economist Henry Hazlitt in his classic book Economics in One Lesson. Our economy is doing poorly; the government can fix it. Our roads are crumbling; the government can fix them. Better still, according to the faithful, pouring money into roads, bridges, rails, buildings, and high-speed Internet lines will fix our economic problems and create jobs.

American public works are hardly in perfect condition, and economists have long recognized the value of infrastructure. Highways, bridges, airports, and canals are the conduits through which almost all goods are transported. But the kind of infrastructure spending the government has been indulging in since 2008 is unlikely to produce much of a stimulus--certainly nothing with the scale and speed the administration is banking on as the 2012 elections approach.

The economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, one of the most influential stimulus enthusiasts out there, claims that when the government spends $1 on infrastructure, the economy gets back $1.44 in growth. But economists are far from a consensus about the returns on federal spending. Some find large positive multipliers (meaning that every dollar in government spending generates more than a dollar of economic growth), but others find negative multipliers (meaning every dollar in spending hurts the economy). As Eric Leeper, Todd Walker, and Shu-Chum Yang put it in a recent paper for the International Monetary Fund, "Economists have offered an embarrassingly wide range of estimated multipliers."

An additional complication is that, according to stimulus advocates such as former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, spending is stimulative only flit is timely, targeted, and temporary. Current stimulus spending on infrastructure isn't any of those things, as I found in a recent paper co-authored with my Mercatus Center colleague Matt Mitchell.

By nature, infrastructure spending fails to be timely. Even when the money is available, it can take months, if not years, before it is spent. That's because infrastructure projects involve planning, bidding, contracting, construction, and evaluation. According to the Government Accountability Office, as of June 2011 only 62 percent ($28 billion) of Department of Transportation infrastructure money from the 2009 stimulus had actually been spent.

The only thing harder than getting money...