Biden’s infrastructure bill: Does it target what’s needed?
President Biden’s next legislative priority aims to be “far more transformative than his first,” said Noah Smith in Bloomberg.com. Having signed the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, Biden now proposes a $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill that hearkens back to “the massive government investments of the New Deal” and the Eisenhower administration, and would reshape “the entire U.S. economy.” Along with spending $115 billion over 10 years to repair 20,000 highway miles and 10,000 bridges, the American Jobs Plan allocates $165 billion for modernizing transit systems and building high-speed rail, $80 billion for Amtrak upgrades and expansion, and $174 billion for consumer rebates for electric vehicles and 500,000 charging stations. The bill would spend billions modernizing airports, water systems, and the electric grid. A recent poll found that 82 percent of Republican voters support repairing our crumbling infrastructure, said Catherine Rampell in WashingtonPost.com. “Astonishingly,” not a single Republican senator supports this hugely popular bill.
“Infrastructure” does poll well, said Brian Riedl in TheDispatch .com, so Democrats “creatively branded” a “grab bag of liberal spending projects” under that misleading umbrella. Just a quarter or so of the bill actually covers transportation and utilities. Also included is $100 billion to upgrade public school buildings, $40 billion to improve public housing, $213 billion to build and retrofit 2 million homes and commercial buildings for energy efficiency, and $10 billion for a nebulous Civilian Climate Corps. “The largest single proposal” is $400 billion for long-term home care for the elderly and disabled, which, “whatever its merits, has nothing to do with infrastructure.” About 15 years ago, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, “politicians began promising big infrastructure bills,” saying the work is “shovelready” and just needs cash. President Obama’s projects got “tied up in permits, red tape, public hearings, environmental challenges,” forcing him to admit, “There’s no such thing as shovelready projects.” So why is Biden repeating the same mistake?
Republicans oppose this bill for one principal reason, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. “They want Biden to fail, just as they wanted President Obama to fail.” In the 21st century, infrastructure is more than “steel and concrete.” It’s providing Americans with a foundation on which to succeed, whether that means removing lead pipes from our water supply systems or spending $100 billion to build high-speed, broadband internet networks. Biden’s bill also includes funding for government fleets of electric vehicles, and upgrades to child-care centers and community colleges. It would devote $180 billion to clean-energy research and development and provide $16 billion to help fossil-fuel workers transition to new jobs, hiring them to plug oil and gas wells and reclaim abandoned coal mines. Is that “real” infrastructure? “Who cares?” It’s all “productive investment in the nation’s future.”
Paid for by—you guessed it—“rich people and corporations,” said Kevin Williamson in NationalReview.com. Biden wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and increase the minimum tax on U.S. multinational corporations from 10.5 percent to 21 percent. Even some Democrats are balking at this binge of new taxation. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat who wields enormous leverage in the 50-50 Senate, wants to set the corporate tax rate at 25 percent. In return for supporting Biden’s tax-and-spend lollapalooza, four House Democrats from New York and New Jersey, “representing some of the most affluent suburban communities” in the U.S., “are demanding a tax cut for their constituents.” They want Biden to repeal the Trump-era $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions from federal income tax liability. These SALT taxes raise tens of billions from “exactly the people Democrats are always saying should pay higher taxes: the well-off.”
Trump himself “was extremely eager” to sign a sweeping infrastructure bill like this one, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. But his administration’s “infrastructure week” became a running joke after Senate Republicans ruled out any option to finance it. The GOP’s nonsensical position on rebuilding the country is: “No paying for it with taxes, and no paying for it with debt.” Democrats may not need GOP support to pass this bill, said Ella Nilsen in Vox.com. While most bills require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, the Senate parliamentarian ruled this week that Democrats could pass additional legislation this year through budget reconciliation, which they used last month to pass the coronavirus relief bill with just 50 votes. If that happens, the White House will justify a party-line vote by citing 2-to-1 support among all Americans for the bill: “Infrastructure is bipartisan, even if congressional Republicans don’t support it.”