The stock market heads ever higher—the thinking goes with rates so low where else do you put money?

And one of the nation's thousands of dysfunctional and/or obsolescent bridges collapsed north of Seattle, bringing out another round of Cassandra warnings over the nation's rapidly ageing infrastructure, and significantly inconveniencing 70,000 riders who daily travel on I-5 back and forth to the Canadian border.

What can we make of all of this?

Sequestration and state budget reductions have forced officials to cut some waste—like the Blue Angels. I'd prefer my taxpayer dollars going to the Pentagon spent directly on defending the country rather than entertainment.

Government deficits decrease, partly because of budget cuts and higher taxes, but mostly just because the economy is improving enough to generate more business and commerce and more income and sales taxes.

But to get the economy moving beyond its current relatively anemic growth track, the country needs to produce more and higher paying jobs, while improving its ability to move goods and services on increasingly clogged transportation networks. Get caught in a ridiculous traffic jam lately? Ask the folks north of Seattle.

One of the best ways to deal with the jobs/infrastructure problem is to ramp up government involvement in public private partnership (PPP) structures to fund the country's significant infrastructure spending gap. In this case the Cassandra's are not wrong. We will suffer through more occasional disasters like bridge collapses, but the bigger problems involve reduced productivity and loss of efficiency due to lack of spending to make basic repairs and replacements, failure to build new systems to meet 21^st Century demands, and a growing population which overloads 50 year-old networks.

The U.S. would be wise to adopt approaches used in other countries to plan out a national infrastructure policy that would serve its most important economic centers—the gateway cities—and then create a uniform process for securing private funding to work with government backstops and seed money from the states and the feds. How can Spain and France let alone China have state of the art high speed rail systems connecting their major cities, while they U.S. has none? And can we afford to have more bridges and overpasses shut down or see airline congestion continue to increase because we do not have enough airports?

Infrastructure means hundreds of thousands of good construction and engineering jobs and translates into a more secure economic future for the country. With government deficits coming down and public private partnership structures available doesn't it make sense to invest for the future? And oh by the way, PPP models can provide a profitable channel for institutional investors to reap solid returns as an alternative to the overheated stock market.

Or should we bring back the Blue Angels at Jones Beach next year?

For more read the latest ULI Infrastructure report which I authored.