America's Infrastructure is Desperately in Need of Repair - But Not at This Price

Real 'infrastructure' spending is a minor piece of what Congress is considering

Welcome to The Campaign Update (Because the Campaign Never Ends). It’s been three months to the day since I cancelled and deleted my former blog for a variety of reasons, and for awhile I thought I was going to be happy with my new situation. My stress level has been much lower with my new-found lifestyle of not feeling the need to wake up and immediately publish some new content at 5:00 every morning of the week. I’ve been a happier person; my wife’s been happier and my cat, Max, has been happier too.

But I’ve missed it nevertheless. Not just the act of writing, which I’ve been doing in one form and platform or another since February of 1986, but also the act of engaging on the pressing issues of the day on a regular basis. Whether it be related to politics, energy, the environment or our growing societal wasteland in general, America is faced with a growing set of intractable pathologies for which no real, long-term solutions realistically seem to exist, and which America’s ruling class appears oddly dedicated to making even worse.

So here I am again, on another platform but with same outlook on the issues and a pressing desire to express them, and I’m going to start by talking about this enormous “Infrastructure” bill the senate is likely to pass this weekend.

Is it a wasteful, pork-laden monstrosity? Yeah, it is.

But here’s the thing: America’s real infrastructure - the roads and bridges, railroads, water management systems and airports that we have always used that much-abused term to describe - are in desperate need of upgrades and repair. The $550 billion contained in this bill that is dedicated to doing those things related to real infrastructure is a barely adequate beginning.

The fact is that congress could dedicate the bill’s entire price tag of over $1 trillion to doing just these things that really need doing and not cover the cost of needed upgrades and repairs. Indeed, the National Association of Manufacturing estimates that dilapidated and out-dated infrastructure costs the average American family $3,300 every year.

But it’s a start. And the thing is this: the leftist radicals and pandering RINOs in both houses of congress aren’t going to allow that down-payment to be made without larding the legislative vehicle’s trunk up with suitcases full of new debt spending for their favorite pork barrel projects. So it is that you end up with a bill that includes absurdly wasteful items like $10 billion to create a “civilian climate corps,” whatever that is; or $20 billion to ‘Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice,’ which obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with anything related to actual ‘infrastructure.’

Add in a few hundred billion dollars more for new subsidies for renewable energy and electric vehicles and making school lunches “greener” and electrification of millions of houses, and you end up with a 2,700 page monstrosity that no member of congress will ever read that does some things that need to be done while doing many other things that don’t. The bill is not only destructive to our society in many ways, it is also destructive to our language, defining things as ‘infrastructure’ that have nothing at all to do with the actual meaning of the word. All in the name of buying enough votes to get the monstrosity passed into law.

The most frightening aspect of this bill is that its $1.2 trillion or so price tag represents just the camel’s nose under the tent in the spending desires of pushers of the “Green New Deal.” If Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ed Markey get their way, congress will be passing new debt-financed bills much larger than this one on an annual basis in the name of facilitating an ‘energy transition’ to address climate change.

In fact, they’re still not done spending money they don’t have in the current year. Those who have been following the debate surrounding this infrastructure bill know that AOC, Markey and many other Democrats have been tying their support of this legislation to support for a vastly larger general spending bill being managed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a current price tag of $3.5 trillion. That bill contains hundreds of billions in more “Green New Deal” related spending.

As a result, the real question that NAM and other supporters of the $550 billion in actual ‘infrastructure’ related spending in this current bill have to answer is this: Is getting that allocation of dollars this year really worth the other $4.3 trillion in unrelated spending that will likely come with it?

From a common sense standpoint, it doesn’t seem like much of a bargain. But then, the U.S. congress pretty much never allows common sense to play any role in anything it does.

God help us.