So Sanders isn't suggesting randomly hiring 13 million people - he's suggesting that the country's infrastructure needs serious investment in order to remain competitive. This is a mainstream opinion held by almost every major analysis of the US infrastructure.
To me this is huge. Our country's infrastructure is literally falling apart.
That is mostly due to decades of misappropriation of highway tax funds at the state & local levels. Simply spending more on major infrastructure projects without dealing with the bidding system will lead to more graft, not necessarily improved infrastructure.
Exactly. There are few people who think we don't need improved infrastructure. The problem is trusting the government to do it efficiently and without graft.
You say that as if the government doesn't hire it out to private contractors already. If there's inefficiency and graft, it's either in the procurement process (which "small government" wouldn't really improve) or in the private industry itself.
Yes, I'm saying this. It's a ratio of both, but I believe that the procurement process is where most of the graft and loss can be located.
No, the real problem -- and I say this as an engineer who would tend be biased in favor of more infrastructure -- is that a lot of the infrastructure we've built in the past 50 years has been a gigantic mistake. It was never sustainable and was never going to become sustainable; we just apparently didn't realize it at the time.
The trouble is that when we allow suburban sprawl, we increase the amount of transportation infrastructure we need not proportionally to population, but beyond proportionally to it. When everybody lives in a city ("point A") it's easy for them to get where they need to go. When there are a few suburbs (points B, C, and D) and everybody commutes into the city then it's still relatively easy to accommodate their needs by building highways in a star topology.
Your argument for a city's transportation as a network complexity problem is accurate enough, but the issue I have with your analysis is that the causes for such complexity to arise in the first place were incrediblely complex themselves. Simply arguing against urban sprawl, as if that was actually something that anyone could control, as opposed to the results of economic forces at play during the age of cheap motor fuel. The problem that you cite is already self-correcting. A lot of younger adults prefer urban environments, in part, to avoid owning a private vehicle at all.
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While it's true that our nationwide mess of a transportation network is complex, it is certainly not naturally occurring. Transportation and urban development have the most obscured signals of any major segment (transportation is about 1/6 of US economy) of the economy, other than healthcare, of course (also ~1/6). Other posters nailed the issue on zoning; it's commonly discriminatory (or at least designed to be) and negatively impacts development patterns to have houses spread far apart and to set up zoning for single-use, when mixed use (store under a residence) is such a vastly more productive configuration. The length of roadway per capita has increased tenfold in many cities and towns since the 1950s, and the maintenance on all that is a huge drag.
Then there's the issue that more of our expressways should probably be toll roads. I lived near DC for four years, and it's something incredible to see how bad people are at picking where to live there. They live far out from where they need to work, but make sure they get a town near an interstate exit. Then they and all the other people in their new neighborhood clog up the road, so it's no longer fast to get into town. SO then they build a massive expansion of the interstate. It's either too little, too late, or worse yet it may actually do the job. That's worse because it paves the way for the next town further out to sprout and cause the problem anew.
Within towns you have terrible zoning that cause things like big box stores with huge parking lots. Minimum parking requirements baffle me; who demands that an ugly store, as a requirement of its presence, ruin a bunch more land with parking that won't be filled more than about two Saturdays per year?!? But those stores don't get to pay their costs, because the town is the one who pays the HUGE cost of running sewage and huge roads to those places, which are substantially less productive per unit of area than smaller stores in downtown-type areas. And people complain that big-box stores push the local guys out of business, but its the huge systematic subsidies for the Wal-Marts that make local stores' more intrinsically sensible development patterns, suddenly uncompetitive.
Then add to all of this the number of towns where towns build roads so wide that people are uncomfortable to cross the street. That's why you shouldn't ask the fire department how wide they need the roads, and why you certainly shouldn't value their answer when they inevitably answer "wide enough to three-point turn in my hook-and-ladder, please".
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