America's public infrastructure is in poor condition. News stories rightfully tout how repairing roads and bridges is an opportunity to fix our aging infrastructure. However, what most people don't realize is that American manufacturing has seen no major capital investments in private infrastructure since the onset of the Great Recession.

In fact, from 2000 to 2011, business investment in capital goods — equipment, structures and software — has grown only 0.5 percent per year. Compare that to a decade before where business investment grew by 2.7 percent each year.

Since 2010, despite anemic investment in manufacturing infrastructure, the sector added more than 500,000 jobs. Nevertheless, during the recession the United States lost around 2.3 million manufacturing jobs, so we are still short 1.7 million jobs. Many of those jobs will never return to the United States, unless there is an infusion of capital to improve plant productivity.

Why corporate investment is important

When a business makes capital investments, the investment is for far more than in just new equipment. It is also for technology that improves the manufacturing process.

Modern farm equipment is a great example of this investment in technology. A new cotton harvester comes equipped with GPS tracking for location finding, microwave-type sensors that measure the cotton flow, and radio frequency identification (RFID) for tagging of each bale of cotton bale that identifies which row in which field it came from. The machine itself has computing power equal to eight personal desktop computers.

After the crop finishes processing, it awaits shipment to a grocery store. It waits in a warehouse until a truck takes the product away. Warehouses with management systems enjoy the innovations that robotics bring in combination with RFID and laser-tagging. Order-picking accuracy increases and productivity climbs since robots do not need breaks.

Now, when organizations buy new capital equipment there is an excellent chance the new equipment includes many important technological advances.

The importance of public infrastructure

In July 2013, the McKinsey Global Initiative (MGI) published a report entitled, "Game changers: Five opportunities for U.S. growth and renewal." This report maintains that five sectors of the economy offer opportunities for sustainable long-term growth. High on the list was fixing, expanding and improving our country's infrastructure.

When countries have excellent transportation infrastructures, it allows for rapid movement of goods and services at lower costs, according to a 2013 report from the U.S. Treasury Department. On two occasions, the federal government led important transportation infrastructure projects.

• Building the national system of railroads in the 19th century
• Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system in the middle of the 20th century

Both periods were followed private-sector productivity gains. Most observers believe there is a causal effect between national infrastructure condition and private industry growth.

A more recent study by the Consultants for Data Processing (CDP) concluded that executives in oil and gas, utilities, chemicals and natural resources that rely on proprietary infrastructure to keep their companies producing have huge concerns about their rapidly aging infrastructure.

These executives face tough decisions concerning the best sites in which to invest — there is little point in improving a plant's capacity if public infrastructure cannot support private improvements. Who invests where and when the investments are made matters.

Survey results revealed the following concerns of corporate leaders with private infrastructure:

• 87 percent of executives identify aging infrastructure as causing serious operational problems.
• One-third of surveyed executives say they are planning to raise infrastructure spending, 8 percent say they will not.
• 17 percent of responding executives claim they will spend more than 40 percent of their operating budget on correcting aging infrastructure problems in the next five years.
• Technology that can predict breakdowns before they happen is a top priority.
• Executives believe that regulatory interference, poor planning and lack of resources are the major barriers to meeting budget and schedule goals.

These problems are not confined to these few market sectors. Food, clothing, electronics and consumer goods in general depend on a solid organizational infrastructure to get products made with quality at low cost. Public infrastructure is vital to getting things out of factories and into the market quickly.