Editors at National Review Online take aim at the president’s infrastructure plan.
Joe Biden announced his plan for more than $2 trillion in spending on infrastructure and an oversized grab bag of other priorities, including housing, manufacturing, elder care, and even the PRO Act, which would make it harder for workers to choose to stay out of unions. Another package, which reportedly could push the total price tag to $4 trillion, is still in the works. This, of course, comes on the heels of a $1.9 trillion bill he already signed into law.
As Republicans and moderate Democrats contemplate whether they can support this — and haggle over details — there are three major things to keep in mind. Biden’s proposal is extremely expensive; our infrastructure is not “crumbling” for want of federal dollars; and Biden’s payment plan involves tax hikes that will damage the economy, harm the middle-class Americans Biden has vowed to shield, and eat up revenue sources that could, if nothing else, be put to better use fixing the existing deficit.
Two trillion dollars is, to put it mildly, a lot of money. It’s $6,000 for every single person in the country. It’s nearly half of what the entire federal government spent in 2019, before the coronavirus spending binge.
And don’t forget, this isn’t the first or the last big-budget Biden spending plan this year. Add in the COVID bill and the next spending bill, and we could be talking $6 trillion, or $18,000 for every man, woman, and child — above and beyond our normal spending, which is not exactly restrained.
Advocates of huge infrastructure spending, meanwhile, claim it’s needed because our infrastructure is “crumbling.” But this is not true, no matter what civil-engineering trade groups say. As laid out in a 2019 study from three economists and a 2020 essay in National Affairs by Eli Lehrer, our infrastructure is, in general, basically fine.
