Spending on infrastructure might not be sexy. But it’s even more important than you think.

Every two minutes, a water main breaks in America. The total amount of treated water wasted every day is about 6 billion gallons, or 9,000 swimming pools. Every day! And it highlights why the infrastructure bill that President Biden just signed into law is so important. The need to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure has become a weary cliché — but that doesn’t change the fact that it is indeed falling apart. And just as is the case with any kind of deferred maintenance, the longer we wait, the worse the problem becomes — and the more expensive it will be to fix.

One way to make clear what a shift the Biden administration’s infrastructure legislation represents is to look at the amount that the federal government has spent on infrastructure over the decades. In the 1950s and ’60s, infrastructure spending as a percent of gross domestic product was over 1 percent. In 2019, decades later and with an exponentially bigger economy, spending was at about 0.7 percent of GDP. The new surge of spending from the bill will raise it to about 1.3 percent over the next five years. And the bill has many good ideas to encourage private investments that would increase these numbers.

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