If that was the case, no infrastructure could ever be maintained.
Australia, for example, has too many asphalt roads; there's just not enough money to maintain them all (in good working order, i.e. no potholes); if we'd built asphalt-on-concrete roads or asphalt roads with proper foundations that didn't cause potholes to begin with, there would be many roads that are currently asphalt that would
still be dirt roads, but the asphalt roads we
did have wouldn't be a bottomless collection of potholes to throw money into.
Instead of doing things Right (building a road that only needs occasional resurfacing because it's been worn smooth), we're in permanent break-fix mode, where there's only enough money to do bodge fixes that need to be 'fixed' again later.
We can't just
stop maintenance and spend money on building cost-effective roads because (bad) asphalt roads without maintenance are
worse than dirt roads (which are also much cheaper to repair when they
need fixing).
We'd need a
significant influx of money over and above the existing break-fix budget to fix things.
Repeat this rant for probably every bit of infrastructure, everywhere, both on a country-wide and household scale. I'm only familiar with road maintenance because my dad was involved with a road that got built
right, and just how much more work went into doing it, and the engineer in charge explaining why it had to be done that way to prevent future problems.
I suspect if we were to fix
everything, we'd need to start printing (even more) money to pay for it all. The problem with printing money is that we (all?) use fiat money, which is only worth anything because the government says it is; if the government prints money (produces new tokens of exchange out of thin air), it devalues all of the existing cash by the proportion of new money that just sprang forth into existence fully formed. Do that
too much, and you get hyperinflation. Do that just a little, and it's just business as usual (as happens any year government expenditure exceeds tax income... i.e. every year).
Arguably, it's the difference between Old Money, who bought a sturdy, not particularly exciting kitchen table decades ago that's still in good working order and isn't too out of style and is expected to see many future generations, or purchasing a cheap kitchen table which you need to replace every so often. If you had all the money you spent on replacing broken things at the start, you could have easily afforded a table your grandkids could inherit.
It's an entirely different question if you can tap into existing money to pay for things, e.g. increasing taxes, or like Taylor, getting at money held in escrow; all of that money is 'real' because someone expended effort to make it real at some point.
