If I were a debased purveyor of clickbait, I’d call this “Everything that’s wrong with America in two charts.” But I’m not, so I won’t. But still . . . 

Hurricane Harvey is only the latest reminder that the US infrastructure is falling apart — a situation that become more urgent as the climate crisis bites harder. Here’s a data series that goes a long way to explaining why. In simple English, the public sector is barely investing enough to keep up with normal decay, let alone doing anything to improve things.

The series is net civilian public investment from the national income accounts. (The source is table 5.2.5, here.) “Net” means after depreciation, aka wear and tear. Public investment means expenditures on long-lived assets like schools and roads. Prisons are in there too. If we took those out, the numbers would be slightly lower — though not profoundly so, because most of the costs of maintaining the carceral state come from day-to-day operations — 96%, according to this estimate — not from building new prisons.