Infrastructure overhaul a necessity, not luxury

This past week, I had the good fortune of interviewing Ben Fountain, one of this country’s finest writers.

The Dallas-based Fountain is a rare master of both the fiction and non-fiction forms and his work — particularly his bestselling novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and his searing opus on the 2016 presidential campaign, “Beautiful Country Burn Again” — has revealed more about the tortured soul of 21st century America than just about any writer you could name.

Toward the end of our Zoom discussion, recorded for an April 16 Gemini Ink Autograph Series event, we started talking about a chapter tucked away near the end of “Beautiful Country.”

The chapter explored the impact of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, making the case that FDR’s legislative program was so transformative, so fundamental to the shaping of American life over the last 80 years, we take it for granted.

Fountain’s chapter offered a refresher course on the country FDR inherited; a nation in which 6 million of its 6.8 million farms had no electricity; where daily life had been transformed by the Great Depression from “extremely hard” to “impossible.”

Roosevelt brought electrification to the rural South and so much more.

“The air we breathe. The ground beneath our feet,” Fountain wrote. “New Deal initiatives produced much of the infrastructure that we rely on to this day, the roads, waterways, bridges, sewers and water mains, courthouses, libraries, and power grids.”

Roosevelt stabilized American agriculture and banking and built a system of social insurance for the elderly, unemployed and disabled. We’re so used to it, we forget someone had to create it.

It’s to Roosevelt’s infinite credit that he lifted the United States into the modern age. It’s to his country’s infinite discredit, however, that we’re still basically living off the infrastructure improvements the New Deal provided in the 1930s.

By sheer coincidence, the same day I interviewed Fountain, President Joe Biden was in Pittsburgh, rolling out his $2.25 trillion, eight-year infrastructure proposal.

Biden’s infrastructure plan drew quick rebukes from Republicans, who regard it as an extravagant socialistic boondoggle.

It also left some progressives underwhelmed. New York Congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez gave Biden points for effort, but said the scope of the president’s plan was way too small. She called for at least $10 trillion in infrastructure investment.

The bipartisan sniping recalled what FDR experienced, when he simultaneously faced attack from conservatives, for allegedly destroying capitalism, and progressives, for supposedly thinking too small.

Getting any infrastructure package passed in this divided Congress will be a heavy lift even if Democrats try to get around a Senate filibuster by using budget reconciliation to pass it. To be sure, there is plenty of room for debate about the scale and the specifics of Biden’s proposal.

But Biden, a career politician routinely pigeonholed as a moderate incrementalist, is attempting something big here.

The plan would invest $621 billion in transportation infrastructure, including $115 billion in highways, bridges and roads, $85 billion in public transit and $174 billion for electric vehicles.

The proposal would also provide $111 billion for clean drinking water (including the replacing of all lead pipes), $100 billion to increase high-speed broadband, $100 billion for electrical grid infrastructure and $213 billion for affordable housing.

If we drop all partisan posturing and accept the concept that government’s most basic role is to provide crucial services that the private sector is not equipped to handle, it’s hard to deny that the president’s plan, at its core, meets this definition.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this past week found that 79 percent of Americans support a government-funded overhaul of roadways, bridges, ports and railways. Seventy-one percent support the expansion of high-speed internet and 68 percent backed the replacement of lead pipes.

Biden’s Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, also pushed for an infrastructure overhaul.

Trump’s $1.5 trillion plan was doomed, however, because his fellow Republicans were lukewarm about the concept and Democrats didn’t like Trump’s approach: leveraging $200 billion in federal investment to get states and cities to pick up more than 80 percent of the tab.

Dilapidated infrastructure is costing us lives, jobs and equal access to opportunity. The power and water outages this state experienced during our midFebruary freeze should leave no doubt how big the stakes are.

Consider this prescient passage from Fountain’s “Beautiful Country,” in which the author tried to imagine what Texas will look like in 70 to 80 years if our state government continues to ignore the needs of its people:

“Crumbling roads, jerry-rigged bridges, worn-out farms. A grudging, ‘market-based’ energy grid. Clean water a rarity, and health care that’s hit and miss.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Texas Highway Department Construction on Interstate 10 is seen in this 1950s or 1960s photo from the Texas Department of Transportation.

Dallas-based writer Ben Fountain reflects on FDR’s New Deal benefits 80 years later.