Katrina VanDenHuevel displays a popular ignorance of economics in this piece, in which she enthusiastically endorses Future President Obama’s proposal to create hundreds of billions of dollars out of nothing (in addition to the trillions in bailouts which US taxpayers have already been obligated to fund) for “infrastructure” spending (refer to our previous piece for the relevant definition).

Am I being petty when I ask why, if government spending on infrastructure is SO important, we haven’t done this before now? Even Ron Paul pointed out in the debates our crumbling roads and bridges as a higher use of the trillions being blown on wars abroad, for instance.

So why wasn’t this already done, particularly in the wake of such catastrophic infrastructure failures as the levies in New Orleans, and the I-34 bridge in Minneapolis? Do the billions of dollars lately wasted on the Big Dig, or being lavished on a tiny handful of residents of Manhattan’s East Side, 1, 2 qualify, and count toward some ideal level of infrastructure spending?  WTF is going on here?

I suspect that a big reason Bush and his co-conspirators “ignored” the need for an “adequate” level of infrastructure spending in this country in favor of invading the world relates to an old, old engineering joke;

Q: What’s the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?

A: Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets.