City Journal ran a recent story about the Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles being covered in graffiti, having its copper wiring stolen, and generally falling into disrepair.
Why should you care?
Because you paid for part of it, even if you don’t live in L.A. Also, the bridge is a symbol of much of what has gone haywire in America.
The bridge was completed in 2022 at a cost of $588 million and hailed in the local and national press as a civic landmark. It was called a “Ribbon of Light” due to its thousands of LED lights. Now it’s dark from the wiring being stolen.
In the fall of 2023, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons published a commentary of mine on the bridge. An excerpt:
The bridge had been projected to be completed in three years at a cost of $428 million. Unsurprisingly, it took six years and cost $588 million, or $160 million over budget.
If you are a U.S. taxpayer, you paid some of the cost, even if you don’t live in L.A. or California. That’s because $364 million of the funding came from the Federal Highway Bridge Program—although the bridge isn’t exactly critical infrastructure of national importance.
Cost overruns, missed deadlines, and hide-the-pea funding have become so commonplace on public works projects that they are met with a big yawn from the media and the public. This reflects the bureaucratization of America, one of the most serious problems facing the nation—a problem that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Why should local government have been concerned about cost overruns when most of the cost was borne by the federal government? It’s an example of the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs—that is, the benefits of the bridge accrued to the citizens of L.A., but the costs were dispersed across the nation.
Such spending is virtually impossible to stop, because of the cost in time, effort and money it would take to organize hundreds of millions of Americans across the nation to take action against a bridge in L.A., or any of the other concentrated benefits and pork-barrel projects at the local level.
It’s the same story with the skyrocketing costs of Medicaid and the corresponding widespread fraud. Nearly 65 percent of the cost of Medicaid is borne by the federal government but spent by the states. Also, the more people enrolled by a state, the more federal money the state receives.
It doesn’t take a PhD economist to understand the perversity of this arrangement, but it was apparently over the heads of the apparatchiks at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The Federal Reserve has something like 300 PhD economists. Maybe it should loan a couple of them to CMS.
A paradox also comes into play. In spite of such technological advances as computer-aided design, instant electronic communications, lighter and stronger materials, and more versatile and powerful construction equipment, it takes considerably longer to build something in the US than it did over a century ago. To wit, here’s another excerpt from my journal article:
Take the Kinzua Bridge near my wife’s hometown of Bradford, Pa., in the northwestern part of the state. A railroad trestle, it was built in 1882 to carry coal from Pennsylvania coal mines to Buffalo. At 301 ft. tall, it was the highest railroad bridge in the country at the time. Spanning the Kinzua Valley, it was 2,052 ft. long. Originally made of iron, the bridge was built in 94 days. Years later it was torn down and rebuilt out of steel in order to accommodate heavier trains.
To compare, it took 94 days in 1882 to build the Kinzua Bridge in Pa., versus six years in the 21st century to build the Sixth Street Bridge, which is 60 ft. tall and 3,500 ft. long.
Then there is the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Its construction began in 1918 and was completed in one year. The facility, much of which still stands, covered 94 acres and consisted of two eight-story warehouses, three two-story piers, ancillary buildings, railroad tracks, cranes to move material between pier and ship, and a storage yard with a capacity of 2,200 freight cars. In all, it had 4.6 million square feet of indoor space.
Building in America today is like throwing chum into shark-infested waters and creating a feeding frenzy among lawyers, environmental extremists, regulatory consultants, and hidebound bureaucrats bearing useless environmental impact statements. By the time they’re done gorging at the public trough, projects run out of time and money—and the nation finds itself with a $40 trillion debt.
The best-selling book Breakneck details how China has built towering bridges, high-speed rail, massive ports, sprawling shipbuilding yards, state-of-the-art factories, and huge cities in record time. According to author Dan Wang, this reflects China being an engineering society and America being a lawyerly society.
At least the US leads in copper theft, graffiti, and homeless encampments, and L.A. leads the nation in these symbols of societal degradation. Many other cities are trying to emulate L.A., including my hometown of Tucson.
If you don’t believe it, I have a bridge to sell you.
Mr. Cantoni is an author, activist and retired business executive. Contact: [email protected].
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