The editors of the Wall Street Journal are again a bit more pointed in their criticism of the Biden Administration’s “infrastructure plan”:
Most Americans think of infrastructure as roads, highways, bridges and other traditional public works. That’s why it polls well, and every President has supported more of it.
Yet this accounts for a mere $115 billion of Mr. Biden’s proposal. There’s another $25 billion for airports and $17 billion for ports and waterways that also fill a public purpose. The rest of the $620 billion earmarked for “transportation†are subsidies for green energy and payouts to unions for the jobs his climate regulation will kill. This is really a plan to build government back bigger than it has ever been.
They go on to detail it out and conclude:
Note the political irony of all this. Mr. Biden says “public investment†has fallen as a share of the economy since the 1960s, and he has a point. But the main reason is that government spending on social welfare, entitlements and public unions have squeezed out public works. Now he’s redefining social welfare as public works to drive more social-welfare spending, which will further crowd out money for public works and government R&D to compete against China.
As usual, Mr. Biden professes to want to make this bill “bipartisan,†but also as usual he let Democrats on Capitol Hill write his plan. That explains its money-for-everybody-and-everything character. Along with his gigantic tax increases (see nearby), Mr. Biden has proven to be the perfect political front for the Warren-Sanders agenda.
I’ll point out a couple of other things I’ve reminded you of before. The first is that the ARRA was popular, too, until people began to figure out how the money was actually being used. Approval for an infrastructure plan in principle and approval for an actual plan are two different things.
The second is that when you have an “infrastructure plan” you’ll get “infrastructure” not infrastructure in the sense of an investment that will expand productive capacity. Consumption is consumption not investment. As the editors of the Washington Post pointed out when it comes to investment the private sector does a better job. Calling consumption investment doesn’t make it investment. It reminds me of what Lincoln said about the horse.
BTW I would wholeheartedly support an infrastructure plan that spent $150 billion on electrical grid redundancy and load expansion and stopped there and I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t get real bipartisan support for such a plan.
