Its because public spending on infrastructure is "socialism" and it is better to give loans to private companies and let "the free market" fix the infrastructure; any day now.
Its an unexplained miracle the US hasn't collapsed yet.
Throwing money at the problem doesn't work if you suck at throwing and can't hit the problem.
nonsense. It's the governments job to do this maintenance. There are entire departments dedicated to it. The problem is that they are underfunded, in part because the money goes ummm somewhere else, and because for some reason taxing people or business enough to cover state expenses is considered bad practice.
Often road widening is based on projections (which are almost universally wrong): https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/09/09/every-traffic-pr...
Interestingly, a lot of these people also aren't in favor of paying less for less nothing.
So the other poster was making the exact same point that you made (unsarcastically), but it sounds like you may not have realized that? At any rate, you both seem to be largely in agreement about the current state of affairs.
> Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, has argued that this kind of socialist experiment would be unacceptable — even to stop babies from starving to death. “Let’s be very clear,” Buttigieg told CBS, “This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make baby formula.”
(For the record, "Socialism" would not fix the US's bridge or baby formula woes because they are both the results of decades of neglect and bad policy that can't be undone in a year.)
Singapore would disagree that government manufacture of baby formula represents socialism. The government can do what it wants without impairing the market. Where socialism comes in is when the government intervenes to protect its baby formula industry, by barring competitors from participating in the market or by subsidizing its own formula manufacture with tax revenues.
It isn't, my comment is a jab on US politics and discourse; though neoliberalism and "minarchism" has corroded the existing infrastructure through "austerity" (money redirection towards forever wars and imperialism) and red-scare tactics.