Biden wants $2 Trillion for infrastructure

Who owns U.S. Infrastructure? Not the federal government. So with a $2 Trillion request from Biden for something it doesn't own, where is the money going? State and local governments and the private sector own 97% of the nation’s nondefense infrastructure, and they fund 94% of it. This is just a "green new deal" tax. In other words, a pay back to unions, oligarchs and party hacks for getting Biden into office.

Who Owns U.S. Infrastructure? | Cato Institute

Joe Biden lied at press conference

For the first time in anyone's memory, household income and wages of the low income made REAL advances during the Trump years as a result of the tax cuts. 82% of us got the cut, and 90% of working people got a raise. But what did Biden spout at the presser? The same old lie--only the richest benefitted. That's been disproven so many times, you wonder where the speech writer was the last 4 years (we know where he was). Growth was greater for the lowest quarter than the upper quarter, plus there were REAL wage gains. Now he wants to chase American companies to foreign soils as higher taxes always do, creating job loss and higher consumer costs here. At the same time, he's bringing in people who will compete with our workers in the lower income groups. Kevin Brady (R-TX) says Biden told so many lies at the press conference (his first) that Twitter should take his account away from him. He's welcoming people who will need a huge safety net and impose costs on local communities, while simultaneously pushing well paid jobs to foreign countries.

Now that he and Pelosi have us speaking trillions instead of billions, and they just foisted on us $1.2 trillion, little of which was for Covid19, but had that check dangling out there as a carrot, now it will be trillions more for "infrastructure," the green grab and more government control over public and personal health.

Do we even know what a trillion is? Let's look at seconds. 60 seconds is a minute. One million seconds is 12 years. One trillion seconds would be about 32,000 years. And $10 trillion still won't change the climate.

What is the infrastructure candidates talk about?

Infrastructure.  Trump talked about it, so did Obama, so did Bush and Clinton.  We only seem to hear about it when someone (of either party) is running for president. But the federal government’s percentage of ownership and cost is very small, so why?

About 97% of what we call infrastructure  is owned and paid for by local governments and private interests.   I found this one really enlightening—I had no idea, but then, we don’t know what we don’t know.  In 2015, private infrastructure assets of $40.7 trillion were four times larger than state and local assets of $10.1 trillion, and 27 times larger than federal assets of $1.5 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Where the federal government does figure for this issue is regulation of and taxes on—I think Donald Trump being in real estate, realizes the heavy hand of government squeezing all businesses. 

https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/who-owns-us-infrastructure

Will infrastructure be next on the agenda?

The infrastructure has been a problem for as long as I've been paying attention. All of a sudden it's Trump's fault? I did at least a 3 minute search and combining "infrastructure" with names of the last 5 presidents only turned up technology and space travel. And some error pages. But I did find an estimate:

"According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, as of 2013 (the year of its most recent comprehensive report), the United States will need $3.6 trillion by 2020 in infrastructure investment to rebuild, upgrade and maintain roads, bridges, dams, water and wastewater systems, levees, landfills, airports and radar systems, inland waterways, ports, rail, mass transit, public parks, schools and energy systems. Roads and bridges account for the lion’s share.

Let states and counties make their own infrastructure decisions based on their population demands and ability to pay, and make users pay for the projects. We need to reduce or eliminate federal taxpayer contributions to U.S. infrastructure needs. Let users bear the burden for improvements through state or local revenue bonds. Pay off the bonds through user fees collected for miles driven, water consumed, flights taken, (dare I say) children educated, etc." Washington Post, Aug. 19, 2016

The failure to Act Report by the ASCE

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/fact_sheets/2018%20Budget%20Fact%20Sheet_Infrastructure%20Initiative.pdf

Building up vs. Tearing Down: Trump and Charlottesville, guest blog

Building up vs. Tearing Down: Trump and Charlottesville
by Jane M. Orient, M.D.

The President’s remarks that provoked an unprecedented storm of hate and outrage were made at a press conference about—infrastructure. President Trump explained why our infrastructure is in such terrible shape. There’s the permitting process that delays projects for years or decades, and causes costs to double, triple, quintuple, or more.

This resonated with me. My dad was a modestly successful general contractor. He built small commercial buildings like grocery stores, and affordable housing. He could have built more. “Old age and smashed feet” didn’t stop him. The city’s inspection process finally did. It was always a problem. He might have to sit around for days waiting for an inspector to deign to show up. Then the inspector could red flag a project just because he was having a bad day or felt disrespected.

So a man who built sound, durable buildings—who could and sometimes did do everything from surveying the land to digging the foundation to finishing the roof—whose livelihood was at risk if he did a bad job—was at the mercy of a government employee who might not know how to hold a hammer or even know the rules he was enforcing. It got worse and worse. Only the big guys who could afford lawyers and accountants, and who had “connections,” could stay in business. Houses got more and more expensive. And they got worse, not better. Most are now thrown together with sticks and stucco.

Big projects are far worse. The U.S. will never regain dominance in nuclear energy without a massive overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A plant that is built in 2 years in Taiwan can’t even get a permit in less than 10 years here. And that’s for a plant that is exactly the same as ones that have been functioning flawlessly for decades. If you have a really innovative design, one that would be even safer, it takes more than 3 years for bureaucrats to evaluate the proposal. Meanwhile, you can’t even build a prototype.

It’s like this for all industries here, including medicine. President Trump sent a signal that he was going to start cutting useless red tape. Would this be good for black people? Poor people? Industry? Taxpayers? Absolutely yes, yes, yes, and yes. It would be a start for making America great again.

But the signal set off panic among swamp dwellers: the 3 million bureaucrats who block productive work. The lobbyists who advocate for rules to crush little guys. CEOs of megacorporations who dread competition. And of course those who really don’t want America to be great, and politicians who keep their power by demagoguing on problems they themselves caused.

The hate-Trump, stop-Trump-at-all-costs media couldn’t allow people to learn about our infrastructure problems and what must be done to fix them. They needed a diversion. So they talked about a mob scene in Charlottesville, where part of the project to obliterate America’s history is happening.

A lot of good people object to tearing down monuments. But some bad folks you wouldn’t want to be associated with got a permit to hold a rally protesting the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee. A few hundred people might have waved their signs, listened to speeches containing offensive ideas, and gone home. But another group crashed the party, without a permit, to fight the last war against “Nazis,” wearing masks and scary costumes, armed with baseball bats. The police apparently let them in.

To me (and apparently to the President) it looked like violent agitators type 1 versus violent agitators type 2. But reporters called them, respectively, “white supremacists” and “protesters.” Social justice warriors, including CEOs and congressmen, are engaged in frenzied virtue signaling. The President supposedly didn’t condemn the type 1 agitators fast enough or harshly enough and suggested there might be a moral equivalence. The type 2 agitators, in this view, had a pure motive for beating people up and throwing things, whereas type 1 agitators were pure Evil.

Some type 2s carried Black Lives Matter signs. Black lives are indeed threatened, but not by swastika-waving misfits. These are their real problems:

• Crime. Thousands of blacks are killed by (mostly black) criminals, mostly in inner cities ruled by liberal Democrats for decades. Trump wants more effective law enforcement.
• Drugs. While authorities blame doctors, international drug cartels thrive under the protection of sanctuary cities, pushing heroin, carfentanyl, and other things you can’t get at Walgreen’s. Thousands are dying. Trump wants to clean up sanctuary cities.
• Abortion. More than 19 million black babies have been aborted since 1973; the rate is three times that of whites. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a rabid racist. Trump wants to decrease abortion.
• Poor medical care. The past 8 years of ObamaCare have brought huge cost increases and deterioration in availability and quality. Trump wants to repeal it.
• Disease and poverty. Over-regulation by environmental radicals, based on fraudulent science, has killed and keeps on killing millions of African Africans (from resurgent malaria since banning DDT), and the war on affordable energy will keep Africa mired in poverty. Americans are less affected—so far. Trump wants to restore reason and honesty to the EPA and other regulatory agencies.

The frenzy really is about the subject of that press conference and its message that Trump is serious about draining the swamp. Those who have enriched themselves at the expense of black people and other hard-working Americans are not worried about neo-Nazis, but about loss of their special privileges. They will fight Trump—and those who elected him—with every vile tactic they can muster.

Kiplinger drinks the Obama Kool-aid

This little item came through today in AIArchitect, the "Kiplinger Connection."

Economic Stimulus
Was the economic stimulus a success? Depends on how you measure.
The answer’s no, if set against Obama’s original goals: Holding joblessness around 8% and limiting the economic contraction this year to about 1.2%. [Yup, he missed that big time.]

But measured against what would have been, it was a rousing success. [You're kidding, right? Have you noticed your grandchildren will pay for this?] Washington added about $90 billion to GDP in the second and third quarters, through direct payments to the states, COBRA subsidies for the unemployed, reduced income tax withholding plus the first round of infrastructure spending. [Notice how little was spent on infrastructure--but isn't that what he promised?] Otherwise, the second quarter contraction would have been worse than the 0.7% it was, and third quarter GDP would have been expected to come in flat. As it is … GDP surely rose in the third quarter, probably by a healthy 3.5% or so. [Gee, maybe he can keep this going 10 years like FDR did?]

One reason for the view that the stimulus isn’t panning out: Obama’s tendency to focus on infrastructure development. Spending on it has been slow to take off…with long lead times for planning and contracting … and slow to pay off in terms of increased business spending and job creation. [Or maybe he was wasting too much political capital on stealing our health care and had no appointments who knew anything about business and capitalism?]

Shoulda coulda woulda--there is no way to measure "what would have been," just as there's no way to know about that job you didn't take, or the one you didn't marry, or that promotion you didn't get, or club you didn't join, or that trip you didn't take. Sure--might have been super, or it could have been a bust. You just don't know. Nor do we know what would have happened if the federal government had just let the recession run its course, let bad companies fail--no cash for clunkers, no take-over of banks and automakers, no petty czars poking their noses into business, no threatening Fox News for pointing out the obvious, no denigration of 95% of American businesses who belong to the Chamber, no take over of the economy in order "not to waste a crisis." But if government stayed out of our business, out of market manipulation, out of mortgages, out of schools--well, wouldn't that mean we don't need them. And what would they do with all that surplus, pent up wind power?

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When levees break and bridges fall

both Republicans and Democrats do a lot of finger pointing, but the reality is there are no votes to be had by shoring up the collapsing infrastructure of our cities. People expect good roads, sound bridges, clean water, working telecommunications systems and power lines that don't fail, but they lust after the pop and sizzle of arts centers, sports complexes, convention centers and riverfront toys.

California is spending barely 3% of its state budget compared to 20% in 1960 on infrastructure. 80% of state transportation officials admit their 10 year plan will be inadequate. $1.6 trillion is needed to update our transit systems. More regions are having blackouts. Politicians, special interest groups, and environmentalists squabble over who brings home the pork and who will fry it. The highway system, for all the raging over polluting automobiles, has returned $6 in increased productivity for every $1 invested; sports stadiums return nothing, and often cost cities more than they invested.

Read the sad tale at Joel Kotkin's "Road Work."

An Op Ed in the WSJ last week (I think it was Aug. 28) pointed out: One group finding opportunity in New Orleans--maybe as many as 100,000--are Hispanic construction and clean-up crews, who are also branching out into small retail stores. If they are illegals, the author thought that was just fine. Because so many people have left, that would mean almost 40% the populace, if estimates are correct that the city only has about 273,000 with many residents deciding to start over in other states.