Infrastructure, My Abutment!
Long ago, and far, far away, we were always taught that infrastructure meant roads, bridges, and tunnels. Modernizing it a bit, we could now possibly add airports, shipping ports, rail lines, and dependable electricity to the definition. That was then. This is forcibly now. Apparently, the all-knowing, non-truly-caring, power-seeking-forever Biden administration chooses to assert, for political and taxpayer dollar squandering purposes, that infrastructure, today, means anything they say it means.
For example, almost $174-billion to be invested in electric vehicle manufacturers (who, thanks to free-market capitalism, don’t need subsidies, if the demand for EV really is there!); then, of course, billions for 500,000 electric vehicle chargers (gas stations never received federal subsidies); $100-billion for school upgrades (perhaps to include actual in-person instruction?); $180-billion for research and development (to include $50-billion for the climate “crisis,” of course); $213-billion for sustainable housing (more on the corollary meaning later); $12-billion for community colleges; $100-billion for workforce development; $300-billion for manufacturing supply chains and assorted additional billions for a whole lot of other non-traditional infrastructure stuff.
Other stuff, per Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), to include by Democrat definition: “paid leave is infrastructure, childcare is infrastructure, caregiving ($400-billion proposed, alone, via Medicaid!) is infrastructure.” The latter cluster, says the Left, is, unbeknown to the rest of us, now to be termed: “human infrastructure”! And, with that, definitionally, traditional infrastructure goes even further off the rails (with no reference or objection, stated or implied, to the billions of dollars said to also be going to Amtrak). To which, we presume tongue-in-cheek but with a sharpened opposition sabre, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) tweeted in response, that then: “Abortion is infrastructure, gun control is infrastructure, forced unionization is infrastructure, whatever the Left wants is infrastructure.” And he has summed it up the best by making it clear that whatever the increasingly hard-left, seemingly out-of-control administration chooses to invest it’s planned $2.25-Trillion additional spending spree in, it becomes “officially,” infrastructure! Clearly the “infrastructure” tag is simply the loss-leader to camouflage spending billions on whatever the Progressive Socialist Democrat Left desires to enrich both themselves, their elitist supporters, and to further strengthen their future control over the government, the nation, and our individual lives.
Given the administration’s elastic (more correctly, endless) definition of the term infrastructure, it seems reasonable, then, to recast the term into what it really has become. Since the Democrats have become superbly inventive and expansive with the term, let’s just add our own interpretation to their new vision of infrastructure, and just call it what they’ve made it: “infra-stretching.”
Some reactions to the administration’s “infrastructure” plan. Said Larry Kudlow: “The infrastructure bill strongly touted by President Biden is really a Trojan horse for the Green New Deal. This whole plan, if passed later this year, will have an enormously negative impact on the economy that right now is booming. It doesn’t need stimuli, …. and it sure doesn’t need to end the fossil fuel energy business. This bill also will include the largest expansion of the social welfare state since LBJ’s Great Society. And none of these programs have a single work requirement. None of them.” You remember work requirements, and or work-training programs, emphasizing individual initiative, in return for the government-supplied financial support. Here’s some more money. Relax. no effort on your part required.
Writer Joseph Klein weighted in on the issue.: “President Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar tax-and-spend infrastructure plan consists of top-down government centralized planning that has no place in America’s free market capitalist system. Biden’s proposals, which he calls the ‘American Jobs Plan,’ is to be funded through one of the most massive wealth distribution schemes in Americna history.”
And the Editorial Board of the New York Post had the following reaction: “President Joe Biden’s $2-trillion-plus spending spree he calls an ‘infrastructure’ plan is mainly a scheme to boost the ranks of Democrat-donor unions and send sacks of cash to all levels of government. The aim, as it always is for the left, is to tell the rest of us how to live.” Columnist Barry Shaw wrote: “Biden’s $2-trillion wish list to build and revamp everything from roads and bridges to schools and 5G would, he said, make America more productive and effective. The only problem with the Biden dream is that it will make everything more expensive and most Americans a lot poorer. The one question every American needs to ask is who is going to pay for it. The answer, my American friends, is you.”
And therein lies the catch to all of this proposed spending, and all coming on top of the recent additional stimulus bonanza (impacting negatively the ability of smaller-to-mid-size retailers and other businesses to hire and retain sufficient staff even to operate), is the plan for increased corporate taxation (corporate tax rate increased to 28%), plus tax increases on certain (likely to become, most) individuals (including taxing capital gains as ordinary income). With that tax increase plan as unveiled to date, the National Association of Manufacturers study estimates that one million U.S. jobs will be eliminated in the first two years! Let that sink in.
However, the administration has been suggesting that the “infrastructure” spending bonanza will create 19-million jobs (“Good jobs, blue-collar jobs, jobs that pay well”). “But that includes,” wrote Fox Business News’ Megan Henney, “many jobs that would be created even if government did nothing. Over that 10-year period (estimated time period for creating those 19-million jobs), the economy is already on track to add about 16.3-million jobs, whether or not Congress passes the infrastructure bill (according to the Moody’s Analytics estimate).” Bottom line: This latest gigantic spending push from the administration would, in actuality, only create 2.7-million jobs beyond what the rebounding economy is predicted to create on its own over the next ten-years. Infrastructure expenditures would, then, represent unreasonably pricey job creation (i.e., $2.25-trillion expense = 2.7-million new jobs = $852K per job created!!)
Beyond the jobs argument, well less than half of the dollars proposed in the Biden plan will actually go to what’s commonly considered to be traditional infrastructure, according to the Fox News analysis. Worse yet, found the analysis, only about 6% of that massive package will actually go to repair roads and bridges.
Senator Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) feels like the proposed package is way, way too expensive, if the real goal is infrastructure. Said he: “I think it would be an easy victory if we go back and look at roads and bridges and ports and airports and maybe even underground water systems and broadband. You could still be talking about less than 30% of this entire package, and it’s an easily doable 30%.” Said former economist for President Trump, Stephen Moore, on a NYC radio interview: “You’re going to see so many outrageous boondoggles where they are giving away all of this money to these (green) companies, a lot of them are going to go bankrupt. The American people have to rise up and say this is not the way we run our country. We pay our bills. We don’t massively increase our debt. We don’t put our financial system in jeopardy. (Bottom line): We are in the midst of one of the largest federal power grabs in the history of the country.”
And speaking of our current national debt, it’s now at about $28-trillion, a record for America, and not the kind of record you want to set…and keep increasing! That total breaks down, right now, to $85,210 of national debt per U.S. citizen! “We will be in a boatload of trouble when we see interest rates spike,” commented Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN). “Once foreign investors decide the United States of America is no longer the safest place to deploy their capital, all bets are off, no policy, no legislation, no monetary or fiscal endeavor will correct that.”
Beyond the staggering proposed expense addition, yet again, to our nation’s debt is that proposed huge tax increase on American businesses and individuals. Tax increases that are supposed to pay for the infrastructure expenditures. But that is apparently wishful thinking. The “infrastructure” expenditures are thought to be spread over an estimated eight-years, while the revenue from the tax increases are not projected to match-up for at least 15-years. And that assumes no further treasury busting outlays, which is unlikely. New York Times columnist David Brooks predicts that the infrastructure package won’t actually be paid-off at all! “I think the Democrats will get what they want on spending, but then they’ll compromise on tax increases. And so, the plan will not be paid for. That would fit the norm.”
Regardless of whichever Democrat proposal, Senator John Kennedy’s (R-LA) response is always quick and candid to the point. Referring to the alleged infrastructure plan, the Senator responded to Mr. Biden: “This thing you’ve proposed has more red flags than the Chinese embassy.” And with regard to the Green New Deal, which encompasses a great deal of the proposed expenditure plan, Senator Kennedy asked: “Before we spend another ‘squillion’ dollars, tell us how much your Green New Deal is going to lower world temperatures and over what period of time. The U.N. says that we can only allow world temperatures to rise another one degree before we have an environmental apocalypse. So, tell us how much your plan will lower world temperatures?” Brilliant rebuttal question and the response so far, as you’d expect, has been crickets. And that’s because any Green New Deal we chose to throw tons of taxpayer money at will not in any way reduce the world thermometer, let alone lower average temperatures among our own 50 states! Despite the delusions of the climate control crowd, mankind’s activities are not the only influence, perhaps not even the main one, on average temperatures or the world environment, in general.
One of the most disturbing, camouflaged provisions (and there are many) within the infrastructure plan are the mega-dollars included to “diversify” neighborhoods. Translation: Break up the suburbs by incentivizing with buckets of money (i.e., Community Development Block Grants) suburban town councils or county commissions to alter zoning laws in order to purposely end single-family-home neighborhoods and impose on those areas the new construction of multi-unit “affordable” (i.e., low-income) rental housing. “Now that he’s president,” wrote Stanley Kurtz, “Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate single family zoning, which Biden calls ‘exclusionary zoning.’ Biden’s plan is to abolish single-family zoning by holding out the carrot of federal funding to suburban towns.” Warned the New York Post back in 2020: “Biden and the equality warriors are using accusations of racism to accomplish something different. Their message is: You worked and saved to move to the suburbs, but you can’t have that way of life unless everyone else can, too.” That doesn’t sound like the megaphoned carnival barker sales pitch we’re being fed, by compliant media, to simply repair roads and bridges, does it?
Meanwhile, as warned by the New York Post Editorial Board: “Job growth exploded in March, with 916,000 nonfarm positions added. But President Biden never mentioned it. Why? Because telling the truth about the booming economy puts a lie to the idea that Biden’s $2.25-tillion “infrastructure” package is necessary, or even responsible. This bill isn’t about creating jobs. It’s about paying off Democratic voters, transferring taxpayer money into union coffers, and having the government decide what gets spent where.”
Republicans charge that the false “infrastructure” plan greatly increases federal government control over we Americans, while creating “slush funds” for Progressive Democrats and their most often wasteful, self-serving, and anti-traditional-America causes. We must hope, fingers-crossed, that this can all be significantly reduced in both expenditures, and in tax-increase size, in the Senate. Frankly, reduced or abandoned entirely, with instead the substitution of reasonable monies directed specifically, and only, at actual, realistic, safety-based infrastructure repair or expansion needs.
(Major “infrastructure” investment plans via The Epoch Times, editors, 4-7-21; Senator Gillibrand/Senator Cruz expand the definition via breitbart.com, Wendell Husebo, 4-7-21; Kudlow quote via foxbusiness.com, Fox Business Staff, 3-26-21; Klein quote via frontpagemag.com, Joseph Klein, 4-9-21; New York Post quote via nypost.com, Post Editorial Board, 4-9-21; Shaw quote via americanthinker.com, Barry Shaw, 4-8-21; NAM tax penalty study stats via breitbart.com, John Carney, 4-8-21; Fox news infrastructure expenditures analysis stats via westernjournal.com, C. Douglas Golden, 4-3-21; Actual jobs creation without any infrastructure money stats/quote via foxbusiness.com, Megan Henney, 4-6-21; Senator Blunt quote via foxnews.com, Angelica Stabile, 4-5-21; Stephen Moore quote via newsmax.com, Eric Mack, 4-4-21; Representative Phillips quote via justthenews.com, Nicholas Ballasy, 4-2-21; Brooks quote via breitbart.com, Ian Hanchett, 4-10-21; Senator Kennedy quote via breitbart.com, Trent Baker, 4-12-21; Kurtz/NY Post quotes via americanthinker.com, Monica Showalter, 4-8-21; New York Post quote via nypost.com, Post Editorial Board, 4-11-21).