Why do Americans have so much trouble with infrastructure projects?

By N.B. | SAN FRANCISCO

MATT YGLESIAS is upset that his fellow progressives are attacking California's planned high-speed rail system as a "boondoggle":

I think it's sad that in the United States, talk of the fact that building a high-speed rail network in California, home to 12 percent of the American population, might cost something in the $40-$80 billion range prompts infighting amongst progressives as to whether that's too high a price even while the Fiscal Year 2012 budget request for the war in Afghanistan is $113.7 billion dollars for one year. In Iraq, where $805.8 billion has already been spent and the war is “over,” $17.7 billion more has been requested for FY 2012. Heck, the total construction costs here are just two or three years' worth of federal farm subsidies, and I hardly think the California HSR project could be completed on a three-year schedule anyway. So it's not like this is an inconceivable sum.

Mr Yglesias claims this is all a result of how the American political system is "wired" for "large-scale, complicated, highly uncertain public sector undertakings in foreign countries relative to proposals for large-scale, complicated, highly uncertain public sector undertakings in the United States." This is true—It's certainly easier for an American president to start bombing Libya than to, say, introduce a massive reorganization of the world's largest health care market. But it's worth remembering that America recently did both those things.

It's not just that the American political system makes it hard to launch big public sector undertakings at home. It's also that even when the America's liberals do get the (admittedly rare) chance to launch a big public sector project at home, there is a long list of things that take precedence over infrastructure development. The American left has a lot more ground to cover before it gets to the point where infrastructure projects like high-speed rail are a top priority.

The United States is still embroiled in a large-scale argument over size and scope of the state that is far fiercer than in the rest of the first world. Britain's Conservatives don't propose dismantling the National Health Service. Progressives can wish that lefty legislators and politicians had more energy to focus on pushing large-scale, complicated infrastructure projects. But for better or worse, those politicians seemed focused on expanding (or preserving) the government's social insurance programmes. The Democrats' Affordable Care Act is, by any measure, a "large-scale, complicated, highly uncertain" undertaking, and while it relies on private sector insurance, it has huge public-sector components. It also has the kind of national scope that all but the most comprehensive infrastructure projects lack.

Mr Yglesias is right, of course, that "we ought to be disturbed by the fact that rail construction costs in the United States seem to be senseless[ly] high in part thanks to bad regulations," and "the fact that there are hugely expensive road boondoggles." But the current Republican Congress has very little interest in expanding high-speed rail, and it's hard to blame the previous Democratic Congress for focusing its time and political capital on health care reform, financial regulatory reform, and (to a lesser extent) global climate change, perhaps at the expense of infrastructure investment.