This past Monday, the George Washington Bridge between New York City and Fort Lee, NJ marked a milestone birthday. The daily carrier of more than 300,000 cars, 18-wheelers and buses turned 80 years old, and a spry octogenarian the GWB is, thanks largely to massive overbuilding that has given the bridge strength to keep up with traffic volume far beyond its builders’ original projections.

There are a few ways to look upon the GWB: as an icon of infrastructure, as a symbol of the country’s can-do spirit during the Great Depression—or as I see it: one of the more fortunate cases among the nation’s highly stressed network of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads and airports. You see, the GWB has been the beneficiary not only of robust construction but also of years of regular, comprehensive maintenance by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Travel a few miles east or west once you get off the bridge, and it’s a different story. You can enjoy an extended stay in bumper-to-bumper conditions on the Cross Bronx Expressway or any of several Interstate highways that seem to be held together with baling wire at the choke points. You’ll know the roads more traveled by the trails of filled-in potholes. And while you’re checking traffic reports to see if there’s a better alternate route, you can meditate on the fact that this congestion and disrepair represents only the uppermost tip of a very big iceberg.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, which has given America’s infrastructure an overall grade of D, estimates that it will cost $2.2 trillion over five years just to bring the nation’s roads, bridges, dams, water supply, power grid and other key components to a state of good repair. That’s the current infrastructure, mind you; the expense of any expansions or replacements would have to be added to that tally.

This is a migraine-inducing bill, but the headache will only worsen the longer it goes unpaid, according to the ASCE. For example, the society released a report this past August projecting that the US stands to lose 876,000 jobs and $897 billion in GDP growth by 2020 if it fails to invest properly in surface transportation infrastructure. That total includes $240 billion lost to business underperformance and $430 billion consumed by increased transportation expenses nationwide.

In fact, the projected loss of GDP growth is about $50 billion greater than the gap between what the US will spend on transportation infrastructure repair over the next nine years and what the ASCE believes it should spend. Naturally, coming up with an additional $846 billion isn’t as simple as flipping the piggybank to see if a couple more nickels are dislodged. New financing models will have to be devised. However, it’s not evident that many of our nation’s lawmakers even grasp the dimensions of the problem, let alone devote serious effort to finding solutions.

It’s valid to ask, rhetorically or otherwise, how we’ll pay for it all, how the already-constrained local, state and federal governments could be expected to reverse years of deferred maintenance (read: neglect). Yet a better question might be how we’ll meet the long-term expense of doing nothing.