What should baffle us, however, is how professionals and decision-makers are so possessed by faith in infrastructure spending. Cities with a mind-boggling backlog of unfunded road maintenance routinely go out and build new roads. Places with pipes crumbling and pumps failing from lack of maintenance give incentives to developers to build more pipes

If the city spends $1 million repairing a street, it’s not sufficient for the tax base served by that street to only produce $1 million of revenue over the life of that street. If that’s all that results, then why bother? The public doesn’t build infrastructure just to have infrastructure.

I ran the numbers; it would take 37 years of my neighbors and I paying taxes for the city to merely recoup the cost they had initially put into building the road. That was longer than the road was going to last. It was a dead-end road; we were the only ones who used it. If my taxes weren’t even enough to cover the initial construction costs, who