Peterson Foundation president David Walker made a salient point today at the Regional Plan Association’s annual regional assembly: we don’t spend enough on infrastructure, but we probably spend too much on other stuff.

“We have to look at some metrics,” Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., said.

On national spending, we are the “highest in the world” on education. We are “the highest in the world” on healthcare. “Nobody comes even close.”

On infrastructure, by contrast, we are “below average” in critical new investments, and “below average” in maintenance spending.

Asked whether this education and healthcare spending wasn’t useful, Walker said, quite candidly, that much of it is “totally wasted.”

As for a couple of numbers: Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said that when President Dwight Eisenhower left office, infrastructure spending was about 12.5 percent of non-military domestic spending. Today, it’s about 2.5 percent.

As we’ve said before, these figures make any comparison of our modest infrastructure stimulus program over the next two years to Japan’s huge infrastructure stimulus programs over the past decade largely irrelevant, in terms of their economic impact — because we’re starting from starting points so far apart that they’re not even on the same map.

You may also like

Medicaid’s Missing Million

The Health Department has been either unable or unwilling to document the eligibility status of almost one million Medicaid recipients, raising further concern about the possibility of large-scale over-enrollment. Read More

New York’s Medicaid Spiral Is Worse Than Hochul Admitted

Although Governor Hochul said last week that the current trajectory of Medicaid spending is "not sustainable," the upward trend is even steeper than she and her budget director have acknowledged. Read More

NY’s Road To Electric School Buses Gets Bumpy

New York in 2022 told school districts they’d be barred from purchasing gasoline- or diesel-powered buses after 2027, and instead have to buy electric buses at more than double the upfront cost. “The purchase of new electric buses will help grow the market,” officials later pledged, “which will in turn help reduce prices.” Unfortunately for taxpayers, those reductions aren’t materializing—because state officials put the prices, and future increases, on cruise control. Read More

Hochul Shows a Jarring Lack of Direction on Health Care

Financing and regulating health care delivery is one of the biggest responsibilities of state government, yet Governor Hochul had remarkably little to say on that topic in her State of the State speech on Tuesday. Read More

Hochul’s Pushing Affordability. It Would Cost A Lot.

Governor Hochul is hammering an “affordability” theme in the leadup to Tuesday's 2025 State of the State address. But her campaign, dubbed "Money In Your Pockets," has so far featured little that would reduce the cost of providing, and therefore buying, goods or services in New York. Instead, the biggest announced and expected elements reflect Albany's waning interest in growing the state economy—and a greater appetite to redistribute what it produces. Read More

Unions Reprogram NYS To Do Less With More

Governor Hochul on Saturday signed an innocuous-sounding bill to “regulate the use of automated decision-making systems and artificial intelligence techniques by state agencies.” But the “Legislative Oversight of Automated Decision-making in Government,” or LOADinG Act, wasn’t about protecting New York from self-aware computers trying to wipe out humanity. Instead, it was an early Christmas present for the state's public employee unions—and a lump of coal for New Yorkers hoping for more efficient state government. Read More

Former Utility Regulator Warns State Lawmakers They’re On the Naughty List

A legislative hearing into spending by the state’s sprawling energy agency featured a surprise guest who offered sober warnings about Albany’s energy policy. Read More

New York’s Public Employee Shortage Is Over

Public employee unions complained loudly when New York's state government workforce shrank during the coronavirus pandemic, using that decrease as pretext to press Governor Hochul and state lawmakers for more hiring and costly giveaways to benefit their members. But the latest data show nearly every state agency has more employees than it did a year ago, and that by at least one key measure, the state workforce is larger than it was before COVID. Read More