New Report Shows States Want to Cut Infrastructure Spending

from the Infrastructurist:




Earlier this month the White House released a report stating that most Americans—84 percent, in fact—are perfectly happy to spend money on the country’s broken infrastructure. But a new study also released this month suggests that such approval exists only in the abstract. It turns out that when people are asked which specific parts of their state’s budget should get cut, they choose infrastructure over all else.

The report, conducted by The Pew Center on the States together with the Public Policy Institute of California, surveyed residents in five states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, and New York. As the above chart from the report shows, few respondents preferred to protect infrastructure spending over health care or education. They were also opposed to funding infrastructure through tax hikes, the authors state:



For New York in particular, the results confirm another recent poll, in which 22 percent of respondents said they would cut transportation costs over education and health care to balance the state budget—by far the most popular response.

Nothing against health care and education spending, of course. But why are people so quick to dismiss the importance of infrastructure improvements? Part of the problem is that people not only see the stimulus as a failure, they also mistake it for an infrastructure plan. As Ken Orski over at Infrastructure USA writes, cries of “crumbling infrastructure” have become synonymous with “demands for more government money, often for projects that yield small economic return.” Although only a small portion of the stimulus was devoted to infrastructure—less than one-fifth of the total “even on the broadest definition of the term,” writes The Economist—many Americans consider it the last word on the subject of transportation spending:



Another part of the problem, says the Pew report, is that people misunderstand how much of their state budget is allocated to transportation. Roughly 20 percent of respondents in Arizona, New York, and Illinois thought transportation made up the state’s biggest expense; in fact it made up 7 percent, 6 percent, and 8 percent of each state’s budget, respectively. Byron Schlomach, director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, told the surveyors:



There’s no quite about it.


http://www.infrastructurist.com/2010/10/22/new-report-shows-states-want-to-cut-infrastructure-spending/