Paul Krugman writes in his Times column:
You don't have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest "report card" from the American Society of Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams, bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still makes startling and depressing reading. And right now — with vast numbers of unemployed construction workers and vast amounts of cash sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually plunged since the slump began.
Or what about investing in our young? We're cutting back there, too, having laid off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families.
Yet as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has written elsewhere (including here in the New York Times), not all infrastructure investment makes sense. In the 1980s, Detroit used federal aid to build a futuristic People Mover, which, as Professor Glaeser puts it, "now glides quietly over essentially empty streets" in a failed city. The civil engineers aren't exactly a neutral party — more construction spending means more work and money for them. And why is it that with all those traffic slowdowns alongside orange "This Project Funded by the Recovery Act" signs, the infrastructure is still supposedly in such bad shape?
As for the supposed teacher layoffs, the graph of local government education employees to which Professor Krugman links shows an enormous climb, from about 2 million in 1960 to about 8 million in 2010, followed by a tiny dip. Did the population of American schoolchildren quadruple during this period? Did educational quality quadruple? Did test scores quadruple? The graph doesn't show any layoffs. The decline in employment in the past year or two may have been the result of voluntary retirements, or of layoffs of local government education employees other than teachers — for example, bureaucrats. And as E.J. McMahon writes, "relative to pupil enrollment, local school employment remains higher than it was in 2000, the peak of the nation's last sustained economic expansion. (Specifically, as of July 2000, there were 130 local government education employees per 1,000 pupils enrolled in the fall of 2000. As of July 2012, local government education employment came to 132 workers per 1,000 pupils in projected fall enrollment.)"
As for the supposed slashing of "the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families," the real problem in college affordability isn't the result of any cutbacks in aid. In fact, under President Obama spending on Pell Grants reportedly more than doubled, to $40 billion in 2012 from $16 billion in 2008. If anything is making college less affordable, it isn't reductions in aid, but rather the soaring salaries and benefits for professors like Mr. Krugman and his colleagues at Princeton and other elite universities, who, like Mr. Krugman, often busy themselves with outside work (writing for the New York Times) in addition to their jobs educating students at the colleges. On top of that comes the cost of hiring university employees to comply with the ever-growing list of regulations (mandated mental health and contraceptive services, environmental and disabilities) that Professor Krugman's allies on the left heap upon the colleges.