Infrastructure is a crutch.

A crutch can be something helpful — the sturdy tool you lean on to steady yourself when you need help getting to your feet. A crutch can also be a detriment — the tether that keeps you from standing on your own.

Politically, there may be nothing better to bear the weight of a problem — the bigger the better. Infrastructure development was what braced America during the Great Depression. The nation didn’t need breadlines and soup kitchens as much as it needed work to do and a goal to achieve.

What propped us up was building tunnels and roads, bridges and dams, schools and post offices. Those weren’t useless pork projects. They connected states, supported communities and served people. Many are still in use today, built to last.

Infrastructure investment won World War II. It built the interstate highway system in the 1950s.

And yet somehow, in the last 50 years or so, infrastructure has become a selling point in campaign by both parties, but is seen as the other kind of crutch when it comes time to do more than talk about it. Huge swaths of our transportation system have been neglected too long. So has our energy grid. The communication system — especially broadband internet — is a new infrastructure that didn’t exist decades ago; it needs to be robust beyond urban centers, for the good of the nation.

After three coronavirus pandemic aid plans that have worked to give money and other help to people during the last year, President Biden finally unveiled his infrastructure plan Wednesday in Pittsburgh.

It’s high time.

This is not a handout. Supporting and developing our infrastructure is a way to help people help themselves. It doesn’t give checks. It gives jobs. It acknowledges that people hunger not just for food but for a sense of accomplishment.

”It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and the middle out,” Biden said, calling his plan a “once in a generation” investment in the nation.

Will it be expensive? Yes. But $2.6 trillion in concrete and technology is a tangible asset, not a drop in the charity bucket.

And America has never suffered by investing in its infrastructure. Building infrastructure helped pull people out of poverty and create the middle class of a post-war boom that is roundly seen as the height of our international power. Closer to home, it was when Pennsylvania was at its economic zenith.

The point of a crutch is to give you a chance to heal and grow strong. Building our infrastructure can help that happen. It needs to happen.

— The Tribune-Review/TNS