A Great Effort

President Biden, of course, laid out the details of his infrastructure bill last week, and the details are probably too much for any one blog post to cover.  However, I can share the basics, thanks to a rundown courtesy of CNBC.  According to the cable business-news channel, the Biden proposal would spend another $2 trillion, on top of the $2 trillion already allocated by the COVID relief bill, on the following items:

• Put $621 billion into transportation infrastructure such as bridges, roads, public transit, ports, airports and electric vehicle development Direct $400 billion to care for elderly and disabled Americans
• Inject more than $300 billion into improving drinking-water infrastructure, expanding broadband access and upgrading electric grids
• Put more than $300 billion into building and retrofitting affordable housing, along with constructing and upgrading schools
• Invest $580 billion in American manufacturing, research and development and job training efforts

Give or take a few billion.

The big act of thinking outside the box here is that President Biden is counting health care, education, investment in job training, and even developing electric vehicles as forms of investment in human infrastructure, an investment in human capital.  Such attention to these details is precisely what this country has lacked since President Reagan began the dismantling of the Great Society that his detractors hoped would only last four years but has in fact gone on for four decades.

President Biden has invited Republicans to give him ideas on how to improve the bill, and they've already given him an idea - that being to junk the bill and stop even thinking of trying to spend more money on things like affordable housing and mass transit.  It's not just the tax increases Biden has proposed to pay for all this that they object to - they don't want to spend anything on these programs even if no tax increase is needed.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is famously on record as saying that he doesn't want the United States to become like a European country, and since Biden's bill almost sounds like something the German Bundestag would pass - thanks largely to a postwar constitution that espoused the same sort of economic rights that Franklin Roosevelt hoped to get passed by Congress after the war ended but died before - you can bet he'll try to stop it.

McConnell doesn't need to, really.  Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has already indicated that he's against the 28 percent corporate tax that Biden wants to pay for his plan.  (Yet another reason to be angry at North Carolina Democrats for nominating a sexter to run for the U.S. Senate ad Maine Democrats for nominating an amateur to do the same.)  He is open to an increase to 25 percent (from 21 percent), so that means the bill won't pass as written.  If it did, Biden would be an autocrat and Congress would be a mere rubber-stamp legislature like the German parliament that existed before the war.  And no one wants that.  But the Senate parliamentarian's blessing of the bill's passage through reconciliation means that Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer is ready to get it done along with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House  So let the negotiations begin.

One thing that will definitely not happen is a fivefold increase of Biden's package to $10 billion, which is what Democratic progressives want - especially noted showhorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.  Is this the same woman I praised only two years and change ago?  It's amazing, really, how one's views of someone else can change, and my view of AOC has curdled into disillusionment and disgust.  Someone forgot to to tell her during freshman orientation that legislation is about compromise and consensus, because she's long since rejected both. I mean, she's asking - no, telling - Biden to quintuple his proposed infrastructure spending when even moderate Democrats balk at a moderate corporate tax increase while left-of center suburban Democrats from the Northeast demand the restoration of the state-and-local-ta decision that was eliminated in 2017 in exchange for their support for this bill.  AOC must think she's President simply because, like FDR, JFK and LBJ, she's known by three initials.  Uh, Alex, dear, can I please see you in my office?

I'll comment on a few of the elements of Biden's proposal, especially a pet cause of his and mine - hint, it rhymes with "ham rack" - in later posts.