Conceptually, I agree with you - but the reality is that many of the skilled jobs you describe take a long time to get trained. Power line technician is a 4 year apprenticeship.

Lack of state capacity, really: there is no way that level of labor mobilization could have happened, and people would have screamed about it every step of the way. The US absolutely hates anything that looks like government expansion, unless it has camo on it.

I suppose it could have been the 1037th Non-Combat Plumber Division and everyone would have been fine with that.

This isn't far fetched.

Militaries in other countries are evolving to do more public works and less defense / offense.

A lot of the infrastructure to facilitate it (the hiring, training, coordination, etc) is there.

Agreed. We desperately need a few large scale public projects. But the country (US) is so divided that no one’s going to agree to anything that selectively benefits one region over another.

Our large scale public projects always seem to end up being villified due to massive overuns, nepotism, embezzlement, and at best mismanagement. It typically benefits one small area too. If we want public opinion to change on these efforts, we need to change the track record to build trust for bigger and bigger projects.

It's hard to argue that the space program was only good for Florida.

Or that the Manhattan Project was only good for New Mexico and Washington.

You are right to point out that MIC related projects like those helped society. And so did the internet, obviously. But infrastructure projects like the big dig are far more common at various scales across the US. Typically they increase the value of land owned by sponsors or relatives of sponsors of the effort, or hire a series of contractors with relationships to the sponsor.

Considering that the Big Dig was financed on super low interest rates - my understanding mostly in ~2000-2004 dollars (which have turned into $0.5 or less and are headed lower) - it really wasn't THAT bad of a deal.

It'll cost ~$21Bn total with financing - but that goes until 2038: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.boston.com/uncategorized/no...

That comes out to ~$500M a year - which sounds absurd - but that pretty massively benefits ~500k+ people per year. That's ~$1000 per person per year - which still sounds absurd - until you factor in that half of that will be paid in $0.5 and a quarter of that might be paid in $0.25 or less.

And then when you factor in that that monstrous highway is gone forever, and Boston will likely be around much longer than another ~20 years - it honestly doesn't sound like a bad deal.

NYC's second avenue subway - at ~$3Bn per stop - if each stop increases ridership by ~30k people - which generates ~$48M per year in revenue, which is theoretically ~30% less than the ongoing maintenance cost (https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/f...) - is pretty similar.

IIUC - currently MTA runs at loss of about $7 per month per resident. That seems like an absolute bargain even for people who don't take the train. The reduction in traffic and cars should be worth way more than that to most people in NYC.