[throwawayboise]

Wasn't a lot of this supposed to happen in the 2008 financial crisis relief funding? I remember a lot of talk about "shovel-ready jobs." Turns out they didn't really exist (there were plenty of infrastructure problems, just very few shovel-ready plans to deal with them).

Also, when you throw huge balls of government money at these problems once every 10 or 20 years, it's a lot less efficient that just funding needed maintenance every year. Those huge federal spending bills tend to get frittered away on all kinds of middlemen and pork projects, and when the dust clears the original problems have not gotten any better.