Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Follies of 2021

Q uick thought experiment for our friends on the left who spent November crowing about an infrastructure bill: Suppose you took a nap and woke up in ten or 15 years. Is Amtrak going to be run any better than it is today?

Thanks to the new law, Amtrak has another $66 billion to spend. In an age when trillions of dollars get slung around this way and that, your eyes glaze over. Is $66 billion a lot? No, it’s more than a lot. It is a colossal, gigantic, Brobdingnagian sum for a service that has previously burned through (only!) about $2 billion a year in federal subsidies. (Reminder that Amtrak is a for-profit corporation. Let’s hear it for the government pumping more money into private industry!) Amtrak has just been given the equivalent of a third of a century’s worth of funding on top of its usual budget.

And what will we get out of this? Amtrak is guaranteed to waste most of that money, given that it is promising to do so. It plans to extend rail lines out West to places where nobody needs or wants them (we have this other ingenious, safe, cheap method of traversing large distances called flying that is vastly preferable, and for manageable distances, people enjoy using these things they already have called cars). Amtrak is also going to spend money to “fight climate change,” whatever that means, and (oh yeah, if it gets around to it) generally improve the shoddy service of the train lines people actually use. In 2026, do you think Americans are going to be wowed by the quality of Amtrak, or still grumbling about it as we always have? Is it management or funding that’s the problem here?

Elsewhere in the so-called infrastructure bill, there’s $17 billion for port infrastructure, which seems timely given that the ports are, in fact, ridiculously backed up. But the problem isn’t a lack of spending, it’s union rules (our guys mostly don’t work shifts around the clock, unlike those in virtually every other country) and regulations such as the Jones Act, an archaic law that prevents, say, a ship that can’t dock in New Jersey from going down to Philadelphia instead. Democrats would have been wiser to repeal it, or at least call upon their president to waive it, than to promise to write more checks to upgrade ports, but of course Democrats love the Jones Act: Joe Biden’s campaign website last year proclaimed that “Biden has been a consistent and strong advocate for the Jones Act and its mandate that only U.S.-flag vessels carry cargo between U.S. ports.” He could relieve the backlog with the stroke of a pen, but that would acknowledge being wrong about the Jones Act all these years.

Because everything the Democratic Party wants to waste money on is either “infrastructure” or “for the children,” there’s another colossal sum, $55 billion, earmarked for “clean drinking water.” Our drinking water is, notably, already clean, and all of those drivers crawling to work on overburdened highways Monday morning will not be thinking, “Hurrah! Our traffic problems are solved now that we’re spending more money making our clean drinking water clean.” Even the most notorious case of not-clean drinking water in decades, the so-called Flint water crisis, turned out to be nothing: Not a single case of lead poisoning that warranted medical attention resulted from the snafu, and if you’re from my generation (born in the Sixties), you almost certainly have far more lead in your blood than do the supposedly scarred children of Flint.

When Democrats want to spend money, nothing can get in their way — certainly not any scruples about whether the money is being wisely spent. We learned this in 2009, when the Dems rushed to put together a completely unnecessary $862 billion stimulus package that was meant to combat a crash-induced recession that was already ending by itself and was in fact over by the time the first stimulative checks were going out the door, in the second quarter of 2009. A big chunk of that stimulus was intended for infrastructure — the portion of it that was supposedly teed up and ready to build. But as President Obama lamented 18 months later, “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” Simply pushing the Go button and feeding money into the slot still isn’t how infrastructure works, yet Democrats have already forgotten what their last president told us.

A bit of information on the matter comes to us from a Democrat-approved paper. “The nation’s most ambitious engineering projects are mired in postponements and skyrocketing costs,” declared the New York Times on November 28. “Delivering $1.2 trillion in new infrastructure will be tough.” Stuff we actually need, such as new roads and tunnels to help increase capacity rather than “fight climate change,” can’t get built and won’t get built, not any time soon. Radical environmentalists and their lawyers, many of whom have passed through the various federal and state regulatory agencies over the years, gum up the works at every step, and union extortion drives the cost of the projects up to rates undreamt of in Europe, which in turn is far more expensive to build in than Asia.

“The infrastructure spending plan is unlikely to rescue some existing infrastructure projects that are bogged down with problems,” notes the Times report. “And even with the new infusion of money, analysts say it will be tough to ramp up infrastructure progress as swiftly as envisioned in the current timetable.” For once, analysts are entirely correct. This is in significant part because of the regulatory nightmare emanating from Washington and made much worse by many states, especially California, with all of the tangles created by Democrats’ environmentalist obsessions. Even as Democrats pop the cork on their infrastructure victory, they endanger the prospects of everything with more and more regulation. You can bet approximately $1.2 trillion that there will be far more executive-branch regulations that delay infrastructure progress in 2024 than there were on the day Biden was sworn in. What Democrats fund on one hand, they strangle with the other.