It’s Never Infrastructure Week
U.S. government investment spending is the lowest it’s been in 70 years. That’s probably too low.
That’s cute.
Photographer: Michael Reynolds/Pool
In the second quarter of this year, investment spending by the federal government dropped below 1.4 percent of gross domestic product for the first time since the 1940s, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. OK, at 1.397 percent, it wasn’t much below, and federal government investment as a share of GDP isn’t exactly a closely watched economic indicator. But the decline through the decades is still pretty striking:
Overall federal spending, meanwhile, is at an estimated 20.9 percent of GDP in fiscal 2018, currently higher as a share of GDP than it has been for most of the post-World War II era. It’s just that investment in research and development, roads, bridges, transit systems, buildings, equipment, and such has been replaced with spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social insurance programs.