I wanted to call attention to a passage in Ruy Teixeira’s critique “economic populism” at The Liberal Patriot:
Speaking of regulations, economic populism has nothing to say about the radical reform we need in the country’s regulatory and permitting structure so that, well, stuff could actually get done. As Ezra Klein points out:
The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.
Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.
Appalling. There are innumerable other examples. How about the $42 billion allocated in the 2021 infrastructure act to provide broadband access to underserved, primarily, rural areas? Three years later, almost nothing’s been done. Or how about the $7.5 billion allocated by the IRA to build half a million EV charging stations? So far, a grand total of seven! This should be completely unacceptable.
I would suggest a simpler explanation than the ones that Mssrs. Teixeira and Klein are proffering for how much government capital projects cost in the United States. We pay more than any other country for each mile of highway, each foot of bridge, and so on.
The simple explanation is that the purpose of these projects is not to build roads or bridges, build high-speed rail, provide rural broadband, or EV charging stations. The purpose is to employ people, particularly lawyers and administrators, in the projects to provide them. Delivery is not just unimportant it might actually be deleterious to that objective.
It’s also how Chicago went from “the City That Works” to “the city with the lowest credit rating of any major city” in a couple of decades.
