“Infrastructure” Spending

Sidney Secular

This was once all-purpose wasteful spending on useless public works that supposedly tied the country together via transportation, communications, and utilities-related foundational structures.

Now it has been expanded astronomically to embrace anything the politicians want to spend money on, especially on pie-in-the sky utopian schemes, mostly misplaced environmental priorities. Only 5% of the proposed Biden “infrastructure” spending is for what a normal person would call “infrastructure”.

President Trump never really got around laying out a detailed blueprint for real infrastructure improvement based on overall objectives. That was supposedly a priority for his second aborted term, but Biden has latched onto it as a means to massively launch the Green New Deal and great reset schemes with great spiels and new woke versions of past democrat new.deals.

And true to amorphous and nebulous form, Biden has cobbled together an over-the-top $2 trillion plus “infrastructure plan” named “Build Back Better” signaling budgetary priorities for the next 4 years. Copying FDR’s lingo, one component of the scheme is establishing a “Civilian Climate Corps”. Paying for it all would come from several sources.

A big hike/spike in corporate taxes and taxing those making over $400,000 per year would pay for some of it, and other means are being “delibberated” and negotiated to figure out how to fleece the taxpayers without alienating too much of the voter base. An old supposed solution is borrowing money and paying it back on an extended schedule on expected returns on investment. The biz whizzes of The Wharton School of Business believe the Biden plan will reduce the national debt by 6.4% by 2050!

Another funding source would be a gas-tax hike. There hasn’t been one since 1993. With gasoline prices spiking due to Biden’s war on oil pipelines and fracking and pent up travel demand being released with the easing of the COVID lockdowns, that could be an option if the gasoline prices can be tamped down some to dampen voter outrage. A promising variant on that theme is a mileage tax–the more you travel, the more tax you pay. This is called a vehicles miles tax, or VMT. This would incentivize the purchase of more fuel efficient cars, and it would especially would charge up those in the market for electric cars or gas/electric combo cars.

Besides the libbers, this also seems to appeal to to what passes for conservatives nowadays. An adjunct of this would be the electrification of school buses and the federal government’s car fleet. This would help drive gasoline-powered transportation into obsolescence–as is the libber plan. This is impractical, but that never stopped utopians from going ahead with their schemes.

But because most electric and hybrid vehicles have maximum ranges of less than 300 miles between charges, and because most such vehicles take an hour or more to charge, they are effectively useless in the wide-open spaces in non-urban America. They could turn out to be somewhat practicable in the urban corridors of the east and west coasts but of little utility in flyover country. Of course part of Agenda 21/2030 is to drive people from the rural areas back into suburbia and the cities with “stack and pack” programs, so the libber ideas dovetail that way.

Other big ticket items in the Biden plan include: $100 billion for high-speed broadband; $16 billion to put people to work plugging oil and gas wells; $213 billion for affordable housing(max stack and pack for mixing up the masses, minorities, and migrants and economic classes for maximum diversity and integration like a tossed salad, and tossing out mainly white neighborhoods in the process); $100 million for school construction(to contain the burgeoning migrant and illegal masses); $25 billion for child care facilities ( A relative trickle); $400 billion for care of the elderly and the disabled(How about the vets?

This sounds like a huge slush fund); $180 billion for R&D (Think Green new Deal and Big Pharma drugs); $300 billion for business and manufacturing(Its gonna take much more than that to help restore the manufacturing base); $100 billion for workforce development programs(much more than that is needed to retrain those left unemployed by destruction of the petroleum industry and all the past offshoring of whole industries). Much as some of this seems desirable, it is all unconstitutional and should be achieved by other means.

The public, browbeaten and exhausted by the Trump beat-down and the plannedemic hysteria-mongering will roll over and be rolled of their money to support all of this. Beyond all of this, the latest libber economic “thinking” is to not worry about budgetary restraints or return on investment and just print the money needed like it was going out of style–the national debt and hyper-inflation are nothing to be concerned about.

E-Mail Sidney Secular: Success_Express@yahoo.com