WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Why Nothing Is Shovel-Ready Anymore.

The time between planning a project and actually carrying it out stretches into decades. To those who bemoan the lack of “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects in America: this is why.

Even if you are a Keynesian and believe that deficit spending helps the economy to grow, infrastructure projects won’t do the trick anymore. By the time you’re actually actually able to get the project off the ground, the recession has been over for years.

And the problem runs deeper than infrastructure. Our bureaucratic institutions are ponderously slow. We need new structured interactions between laws, courts, and agencies that can process information and make decisions in real time — rather than putting everything in bureaucratic limbo for decades.

Slow governmental process is a facet of the blue social model and the progressive era civil service bureaucracies and slow procedures that model has historically entailed. And the high costs associated with it are among the reasons that the model is dying.

Indeed. Plus, from the comments: “I propose that the problem is that Blue and Green don’t mix.”