But the alternative shouldn’t be to stop funding public works altogether, particularly when new reports on the sorry state of American infrastructure seem to appear every month. The alternative should be to fund them in a better way. And, as it happens, that’s precisely what the Obama Administration and some of its allies have in mind, as part of their push for new steps to revive the economy.

You have probably heard about this proposal already: It’s called the National Infrastructure Bank. And the concept is pretty simple. The federal government would create a quasi-independent bank – which, in turn, would finance infrastructure projects by offering grants, loans, and subsidies to worthy projects. The federal government would provide the bank with start-up funds, through a large initial appropriation. But the idea is to have the bank finance itself over the long run, issuing bonds or borrowing money through the Treasury Department as necessary.

The primary rationale for the bank – and the reason it should, in theory, appeal to skeptics of government – is to insulate decision-making from the usual political influences. And that doesn’t simply mean staying away from legislators’ pet projects. It also means moving away from funding formulas that have distributed infrastructure funds with little regard for actual need, particularly when it comes to transportation.

As Ethan Pollack, of the Economic Policy Institute, explains:

The problem goes beyond the earmarking process – in in fact, the program formulas are often written to reapportion funding to certain states at the expense of others for the sake of parochial interests, with little regard for overall efficiency of allocation. … In order to garner sufficient political support (especially in the Senate), the funds are spread evenly across the country. This was not a problem in the past, as funds were needed across the country during the construction of the interstate highway system. But as the system neared completion, this investment strategy began exhibiting steep diminishing returns.

The bank, by contrast, would make its decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, without all the congressional meddling. It might sound like a pipe dream, but the Recovery Act launched a working model for that sort of program in 2009. It’s called the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program, or TIGER. And it counts among its fans journalist Michael Grunwald, who knows a thing or two about government waste. (Yes, that's twice today I'm quoting him.) As Grunwald writes: