Now that I finally am on a real computer, I can type out my 2c on this matter.
First of all, it is a very good point several are making. How many 'infrastructure crisis' bills have we had in the past few decades totaling how many trillions of dollars yet we see little to no accomplishment and the government keeps coming back and telling us every few years we are in another crisis, pointing out the same examples that were never fixed during the last crisis threw hundreds of billions of dollars at it... lather, rinse, repeat. (at that, there are a couple of the very same bridges they use as the same example in stories I can find every five years or so).
At some point, when your teenage daughter tells you she needs a hundred dollars for shoes for gym ever week, and you keep giving her your Amex without ever seeing shoes, you should ask yourself what she is really spending that on. The government should be forced to account for our money that is being spent and we need to say No! occasionally (often) until our public servants show they are prudent with the fruits of our labor....
....now, on to the other discussion regarding paying for it with more taxes. Something we constantly hear from the left. I have a bit of an analogy for you.
Imagine the US economy is a big corn farm and you are the farmer.
Do you have that in your mind? Good.
Now, on your farm, with your corn, you have to feed your family and your employees, so you set a bit aside for them and you plan for that in how you plant your fields. You also have corn you sell to the towns, after all, that's why you have a farm.
Most importantly, you have to set aside some of your corn to replant for the next year's harvest.
Now here comes Mr. Government Man, and he tells you he needs some of that corn so he can pay people to fix the roads for you. All well and good, you account for that, adjusting the corn you set aside to replant, the corn you sell, and the corn your family eats to give Mr. Government Man his corn.
..and every year, Mr. Government Man keeps coming back, wanting more and more corn. The more corn he takes, the less you have to replant.
Soon you start to have a choice, do you replant the corn or do you feed your family. The less you replant, the less you have to feed your family next year and the less you can replant until your crop gets smaller and smaller.
Worse, as in this analogy, that darn road never gets fixed....
That's how the economy works. The more government takes, the less that is invested in the economy to grow. The more the government allows to stay in the economy, the more it grows so the more they can have in the long run. But the government doesn't think in the long run, they think about how much they can squeeze now.
That's why economist after economist from Art Laffer to Milton Friedman have shown, and we can see this from actual past events, that increasing taxes actually decreases revenues to the government over the long run, while decreasing taxes increases revenue to the government.
Simply put, the more the economy grows, the more the government will get in the long run for their precious, precious roads....
...but of course, that means less control and more long-term planning that is accountable. Bureaucrats don't like that.
