To hear President Biden tell it, his latest massive spending bill – 2.3 trillion dollars – is about infrastructure. “It’s not a plan that tinkers around the edges. It’s a once in a generation investment in America, unlike anything we’ve seen since we built the Interstate Highway System or the space race decades ago.” He said Wednesday.
His media allies also bill it as the same.
George Stephanopoulous of ABC said “Now to President Biden, unveiling his massive plan to rebuild America – more than 2 trillion dollars proposed for roads and bridges across the country and fast track clean energy.”
Like his boss before him, who – according to people with direct knowledge – repositioned the phrase Global Warming to the more apocalyptic Climate Change, because warm connotes contentedness , quote: “people like warm”…”warm feels good to them, Obama said. Critics say Biden is baiting and switching, too.
“I’ve never heard phrases like human infrastructure or social infrastructure,” said Trey Gowdy, “it was always roads and bridges and ports and airports and pipes, I have no idea what social infrastructure means.”
As proposed, the bill spends only 115 billion to modernize roads and bridges and another 111 billion to replace all lead pipes. The rest of the two plus trillion goes to novel interpretations of “infrastructure.”
In an exchange in the White House with Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Peter Doocy asked “Only 5% of the spending in this package goes towards roads and bridges, and I’m curious why that number is so low, and something that is being sold as an infrastructure package?” Psaki responded by saying “We’re actually selling it as a once in a century or once in a generation investment in partly our infrastructure, but partly industries of the future, American workers in the workforce, and there are areas like broadband, which maybe is not a physical bridge, but 1/3 of the country doesn’t have access to broadband, so that impacts workers, workers who have been working from home, kids who are trying to learn at home, parts of the country where they can’t have jobs where they’re working remotely, we feel that that is an area where we can improve.”
Advocates maintain the term infrastructure, to include components of the Green New Deal and alternative energies, is necessary in the 21st Century.
“We saw US citizens living in Texas, melting snow in their bathtubs, to be able to flush their toilets in the United States of America.” Said Pete Buttegeig, Transportation Secretary. “That is unacceptable. So yes infrastructure includes energy infrastructure, you know what else is part of infrastructure now, broadband, I’m proud of the fact even though it’s a little outside my lane on the transportation side. I’m proud of the fact that we’re going to finally get broadband out to every American because we know, especially in rural areas, how much that’s cutting people off from opportunity.”
But critics contend its a stretch to include in an infrastructure bill, The Pro Act, The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would force Right To Work states to, in effect, require unionization.
“The ProAct gives organized labor from what we can determine carefully reading the ProAct, about 51 different changes to our labor laws today to enable them to do exactly that.” said Michael Litito of the Workplace Policy Institute.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President of American Action Forum said “It’s a sweeping piece of legislation. It’s why it deserves more attention. This would literally overturn the American workplace as we know it.”
Then there’s the question of how it’s all paid for. Mitch McConnell said “It’s called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan Horse, there’s got to be more borrowed money and massive tax increases.”
If there are no Democrat defections, and if the Infrastructure Bill can get use Budget Reconciliation, it would pass with only the narrowest of margins – a purely partisan bill that would likely widen divisions in a country where nearly half the population feels it has no say over the biggest proposed government program since Roosevelt’s New Deal.
