The CBO projects that the federal government will collect $2.14 trillion this year. That's a hefty 58% increase from a decade ago. Washington may have many problems, but a shortage of money is not among them.
All those dollars have not just gone to Iraq. The $286.5 billion highway bill is evidence that Washington is spending record amounts on infrastructure. And there's lots being lavished on all types of capital expenditures. The budget of the Army Corps of Engineers -- the federal agency tasked to help waterproof New Orleans -- is 31% higher today than it was 10 years ago.... In Louisiana, real per capita spending rose by 59% from 1991 to 2002....
The highway bill is a case study in spending money based on political prioritization, not economic or social need. Amid the 6,500 earmarks in that bill, Louisiana pols managed to sneak in $400,000 for the Mississippi River Trail and Bikepath and $3,200,000 for bike and pedestrian crossings of the Washington-Palmetto Canal. While the bill could be stretched to include bike paths for Louisiana, it apparently couldn't to include funding for levee construction.
Even more broadly, this is a good time for us to rethink the locus of infrastructure spending. If a lot of officials in New Orleans knew this was a disaster waiting to happen, perhaps the problem could have been better addressed if the tax dollars city residents pay for infrastructure of all sorts stayed in the city, rather than being cycled through the expensive Washington bureaucracy.
There are many public policy questions to be asked in the wake of Katrina. But we don't need to ask whether there are sufficient dollars to perform the basic functions of government. There are
