The Senate is moving to pass a massive infrastructure spending bill.
One reason that the bill has garnered so much attention from politicians is that it’s something both Democrats and Republicans have sought to get done. And that is because improved infrastructure is something the people want as well (at least in theory).
But beneath the surface of this seeming agreement lie substantial obstacles to doing good for the people. Not least among these obstacles is a fundamental disagreement about the definition of infrastructure. While the Senate appears to have worked out those differences, at least for now, they still remain. To most people, infrastructure means the physical improvements to land that make our lives easier. Think of improvements to highways, bridges, ports, and airports that facilitate cheaper, safer travel.
To our Democratic Party friends, however, infrastructure increasingly means whatever they want it to mean. We have heard declarations that “healthcare is infrastructure,” and that “climate change is infrastructure.” Part of President Joe Biden’s original infrastructure proposal would increase pay for home healthcare workers and stimulate demand for electric vehicles. Despite agreement in the Senate, many progressives still demand this kind of “infrastructure” spending as a condition of voting to advance more traditional infrastructure projects.
These rhetorical gymnastics seem to be part and parcel of the left’s playbook. Too often, they think that simply applying a label to something changes the nature of the thing itself. But this is just an exercise in self-delusion.
Another issue, much less discussed but equally important, is that infrastructure spending by Washington is not an “investment” in the way that many politicians claim. When most people think about the concept of investing, they envision prudently spending money now to create future returns — investments that seek to minimize costs while maximizing value.
But it is nearly impossible for government infrastructure “investments” to do this. No one can be sure what “value” folks will get when the legislation is passed. That’s because these bills rarely, if ever, identify specific projects that will be funded. Analysts just assume that the chosen projects will benefit the people. But not all projects are created equal; the economic benefit from, for example, building a bridge that substantially improves travel between two points will be greatly different than merely repaving a road.
While road repaving might be a necessary expense, its economic benefit pales in comparison to the first. The cost side of the equation is even worse. The government has added so many bureaucratic and administrative requirements to federal projects, including innumerable environmental reviews and other permitting processes, that a substantial portion of infrastructure spending actually goes to legions of bureaucrats, lawyers, and bean counters rather than into actually building things.
As then-President Barack Obama quipped when the 2009 stimulus bill failed to create as many jobs as expected, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
Even if you can get through the bureaucratic morass, the government has ensured that it will not get a good deal on the labor that actually constructs our roads and bridges. The Davis-Bacon Act requires federal contractors to pay the “prevailing wage,” regardless of whether a construction company thinks it can get a project done for less.
Another issue is how to pay for this spending.
The Senate claims that its infrastructure plan is “fully paid for.” But it’s mostly paid for through budgetary gimmicks and extending existing “temporary’ fees and tax programs. We still have serious spending and debt problems in this country. We are cutting the legs off of the next generation by foisting trillions of dollars of debt onto their futures. At some point, that bill will come due.
The solution to a debt problem is not to continue adding to it; it is to address it by prudently lowering the debt burden. Every single dollar this infrastructure bill proposes to spend, including $7.5 billion on charging stations to subsidize the car purchases of rich liberals, is a dollar the government is not devoting to getting its fiscal house in order. Put simply, we need to tighten up our fiscal belt.
I have no doubt that there are many physical infrastructure projects that need attention. But it’s a mistake to simply shovel trillions of borrowed dollars out the door. Those dollars will go to projects that quickly become bogged down and laden with expensive administrative requirements — or used for things that do not remotely resemble infrastructure.
We can and should do better.
Ben Carson is the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute and the former 17th secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
