Time to build us up

Biden’s pricey plan for U.S. infrastructure is worth it, and there are 3 big reasons why.

As Congress digs into President Biden’s $2.3 trillion tax-and-spend proposal to shore up America’s badly neglected infrastructure, Republicans and other skeptics can be forgiven for arching their eyebrows over the plan’s jaw-dropping scope.

Sure, President Trump and most of the GOP called for a massive infrastructure investment back in 2017, too, but not even our extravagant ex-president put this many zeroes of federal dollars behind his ambitions.

Adjusted for inflation, Biden’s total is more than 10 times what the United States spent to put a man on the moon. Heck, it’s even more than the Pentagon and State Department combined spent over 20 years on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But no matter what you think of the plan so far, there are at least three aspects worthy of your attention.

It’s paid for

First, the spending, as proposed, is paid for. Republicans used to favor that approach. In fact, when Trump first got serious about tax cuts in 2017, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the leaders of the U.S. Senate and House, insisted that the tax cuts be paid for by spending cuts or boosted economic growth. Those commitments fizzled, however, and the tax cut instead will cost the treasury roughly a net $1.5 trillion over its first 10 years.

Of course, Biden is no deficit hero. He pushed through the massive coronavirus relief earlier this year without paying for it, either. He justified that — appropriately, we argued — by the emergency facing the nation. But so far, he doesn’t seem content to rely on the national credit card to finance his historic investment in infrastructure, and that’s something Republicans ought to welcome.

Biden’s eight-year plan calls for big borrowing in its early phase, but would pay nearly every dollar back with $2 trillion in higher corporate taxes over 15 years.

The plan would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, still lower than the 35 percent rate before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. It takes aim at quirks in the tax code allowing U.S. corporations to move profits overseas in an attempt to lower and in some cases, eliminate, tax liability. The New York Times reported earlier this month on a study finding 55 of America’s biggest companies — including FedEx, Duke Energy, Kinder Morgan and Nike — avoided paying any federal income tax for the past three years despite earning billions.

Republicans will find plenty of things to object to in Biden’s proposal — no small matter given that the GOP holds 50 seats in the Senate. But compare Biden’s approach to his predecessor’s. In 2016, Trump promised to eliminate the national debt — then sitting at $20 trillion — in eight years. Four years later, it stood at $27 trillion. Second, Biden’s proposed spending has a purpose. Hard-working Americans don’t have to wait for its benefits to trickle down; they can observe them from the ground up. Biden aims to retrofit America’s infrastructure — including roads, bridges and ports, of course, but also its human infrastructure — to prepare us for the future. All of Americas’ water systems would see harmful lead pipes replaced. An estimated 20,000 miles of highway would be improved. Tens of thousands of affordable homes would be built.

America has been as ambitious before, but not for a long time. Biden’s proposal dwarfs the plan he helped President Obama sell to Congress 12 years ago. While progressives had eyed that plan as a vehicle for lasting infrastructure investments, calling for modernizing of the electric grid, fasttrack high-speed rail and much else, Congress settled on a much smaller plan. It cost roughly $787 billion — about 40 percent of it tax cuts, a concession by Obama to Republicans aimed at winning bipartisan support that never materialized.

Bigger and more expensive ideas failed then, in part, because the more urgent task was to save a still-teetering economy by funding “shovel-ready” projects that could put people to work right away.

While the plan did likely stave off deeper recession, author Michael Grabell’s book, “Money Well Spent?” appraising the stimulus bill, concludes that it was neither big enough to transform America, nor tightly focused enough to provide more than temporary help — and along the way fomented lasting political opposition to the kind of big-picture reforms the nation needed.

It’s Houston-friendly

The true antecedent to such reforms stretches back nearly 100 years ago, when massive investments by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower helped move America out of the Great Depression, through World War II and into the American Century that followed. Investments in the GI Bill in the 1940s sent millions to college and expanded homeownership, and billions invested in the following decades expanded highways and bridges in the federal interstate program.

Today, Democrats under Biden want to go even bolder. As the debate in Congress resumes this week, Republicans wary of giving a Democratic president a landmark achievement should take care that politics as usual doesn’t derail what Biden rightly calls a once-in-a-generation investment.

Need a third reason? Anyone living in Houston, where our roads need paving, our transit needs expanding, our air needs cleaning, our electric grid needs winterizing, and our homes need protection from ever-more-frequent and intense storms should think twice about knocking down an ambitious plan for America that seeks, at long last, to build us back up.