As anyone who watched that Gonzaga-UCLA
game last night knows—especially if you were rooting for the Zags—there is a
fine-line between a “stunning upset” and a “great game.” But there is no “fine
line” when it comes to interpreting what Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan is, and
what Donald Trump’s alleged “plan” was.
In 2015, Trump boasted that he
was going to “fix” this country’s infrastructure and make it “second to none.”
This was of course more of the same hyperbole that Trump expectorated from his month, and few took it seriously save his Fox
News friends, and was a useful propaganda line for supporters answering
skeptical queries about why they believed in Trump. This was a year after the
American Society of Civil Engineers told us that it would cost $2 trillion to
repair or replace old and decomposing infrastructure just to get started.
Why there should be a “problem”
coming up with the money for that when Biden’s COVID-19 spending package cost
that much—and considerably less than the first pandemic package last year—is mystifying.
The “problem,” it seems, is that the term “infrastructure” just doesn’t seem to
relate to people on a “personal” level, even though they use it every day and
depend upon it being in workable order every time they step out into the
world—and even when they are fast asleep on a winter night.
There is apparently some
disagreement about what “infrastructure” actually refers to. We knew what it
meant in regard to FDR’s New Deal projects: 650,000 miles of roads, 8,000
bridges, 800 airports, and the Tennessee Valley Authority—the latter much-hated
by private power companies because it is an example of how a government-run
system is more efficient and provides cheaper power than a privately-run
entity. Construction of the interstate highway system was begun in the
Eisenhower administration, in which 45,000 miles of highway were eventually
built into the mid-1990s.
Barack Obama’s economic recovery
bill was not an “infrastructure”
plan, but it did spend a significant amount of money on such projects, repaving
over 40,000 miles of roads and repairing over 2,500 bridges. But by 2014, when the
ASCE made its cost estimate to repair old and decomposing infrastructure just
to keep things from falling apart altogether, what had been done hardly even
started to address the issue. The History Channel’s “Life After People” series
more or less showed us what happens when infrastructure is ignored for too
long.
But Trump talked “big,” and his talk
was cheap. Trump never put forth anything close to a comprehensive plan with
specific details about what would be done on what and where. First of all, Trump’s so-called funding plan
killed any chance of major infrastructure projects to go forward to begin
with; nearly 90 percent of the funding would be on the shoulders of
cash-strapped state and local governments. Let’s recall that Trump’s big
legislative “victory” was his so-called “job creating" corporate tax cut, which did
not create new jobs, but only increased the largesse of the wealthy. Putting people
to work on massive infrastructure projects on the scale of past programs in
theory would put millions of people to work on projects that benefit the whole
country, create more consumers and expands the economy and increases the
taxpayer base instead of trillions of dollars wasting away in the pockets of
the few.
Trump’s so-called infrastructure
“plan” was never really of interest to Republicans, and Trump’s infamous
meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to allegedly “discuss” infrastructure
was shown to be what was: a viral video attempt to air his “grievances” against
Democrats, which Schumer and Pelosi walked out of minutes after it started. The
farcical aspect of Trump’s “plan” is there never was a “plan”; someone told him
that he could call his gutting of environmental regulations in order to make it
easier to plunder the public lands in search of fossil fuels (such as the use
of fracking) an “infrastructure” plan.
According to the Wiki page on
Trump’s “plan”—it’s content seems to be extremely sensitive to Trump’s
“feelings” in regard to criticism (or the truth)—“infrastructure” is a “broad
term that means different things to different people.” Is that right? I think
to most people there is no “confusion” about what infrastructure means, when we
hear news of a major reservoir breach in Republican-controlled Florida, one
that is filled with toxic waste water.
Biden’s plan is more “specific”
than anything Trump and his stooges could dream-up on the fly; that was always
just a campaign stunt to begin with. The $2 trillion proposal seems in line
with what is required, according to the ASCE’s numbers. Over $600 billion is to
be spent on roads, bridges, rail lines and expanding electrical transportation
systems. Another $100 billion would go to improving or replacing underground
water systems and piping; another $100 billion would go to improving broadband
networks, especially in rural and underserved urban areas. $500 billion is to
go to research in expanding domestic manufacturing in “critical technologies”
and “clean energy.” Most of the rest
will go to “quality of life” projects (housing, expanding Medicare, pay raises
for caregivers) and schools.
Of course, the problem is how to
pay for this. Biden’s plan includes halving Trump’s tax cuts for corporations,
from 14 percent to 7 percent. Despite
the fact that we have just seen another $1.9 billion in money we don’t “have”
on another COVID-19 relief bill, somehow an infrastructure plan that always
sounds “good” just doesn’t seem to be worth spending money on. As with the New
Deal projects, it wouldn’t be all money down a sink hole. Projects that create
jobs also create consumer spending, taxes and economic growth—some of that
money actually comes back. That is unlike Trump’s tax cuts, which did not
create jobs or go to research or improve manufacturing capability, but most of
the largess went back into the pockets of the wealthy, shareholders, or in
offshore tax havens. This is always the fallacy of so-called “trickle-down economics”;
in reality, it always “trickles-up.”
Let’s be honest here. That
hang-dog dullard Mitch McConnell has already stated that Biden’s plan has no
shot for pure partisan reason, but what else do we expect from him? The
“moderate” Democrats are already unhappy about Biden’s tax increase on
corporations—even though it really isn’t a tax increase, but bringing corporate
tax liability back to within reason. Pelosi and others favor what can only be
called a “regressive” taxing system, where the burden falls more heavily on
lower and middle-class people. Can we expect anything to come out of this? Only
in a very truncated form if those “moderate” Democrats get their way. I don’t
think anyone should be holding their breath on this. Still, you have to give
Biden credit on this: this is a “real” infrastructure plan, not that fake thing
that Trump fobbed-off as a “plan.”
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