The connection between economic growth and infrastructure is central to the administration's thinking for increasing our standard of living in the future, not just more jobs but better jobs at higher incomes. That means increasing our productivity, which clearly means increasing investment, both public and private. We must do two things at once, and they are both hard things. We must reduce the federal budget deficit because it is a drain on private saving that has been going on too long and that will escalate if we do not do something about it. Reducing the deficit means either cutting back on programs to which people and politicians are committed or increasing revenues.
Nobody likes to do either one.
Not all of the investment needed to make the economy grow can be in the private sector. Reducing the federal deficit at the expense of federal investment would be very counterproductive. If there is anything that we have learned from analysis, thought, and observation, it is that we also need to increase public investment in workforce skills, in staying in the forefront of technology, and in having a modern, effective infrastructure. There has been a lot of controversy among economists, most of it fairly esoteric, about how you measure the contributions of infrastructure to productivity and economic growth. There have been some wild claims that make it sound as though just fixing the roads and bridges is all we need to do to get the economy moving again.