Never mind the old aphorism. In 2021, it seems the road to hell is actually paved with “infrastructure.”
The early Biden administration was consumed with the task of selling a completely new definition for that word. In the past, “infrastructure” referred to roads, rails, bridges, waterways, and then electrical and telecommunications grids. Then, over the years, and over the objections of fiscal conservatives, people even came to accept the idea that bicycle paths and other purely recreational transportation options should be included under that umbrella as well.
But President Joe Biden has taken the redefinition to a whole new level. Surely, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg never dreamed, as he played with his model trains as a boy in South Bend, Indiana, that he would one day serve his country by going in front of a media firing squad to defend “elder care” and paid leave as genuine examples of “infrastructure.”
That was the fun part of Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal — to pass off as “infrastructure” (or as “human infrastructure”) basically every bad idea liberals have had in the last 70 years. But dig into the details, and the intentions were considerably more malevolent than that.
That “elder care,” for example, is actually a variation on a well-known scam by which labor unions have been allowed in some states, by unscrupulous governors, to steal from sick and elderly Medicaid patients. The idea is to force their unwilling caregivers to pay union dues in order to prop up dying unions that need the cash. It’s a great way of converting taxpayer funds into Democratic campaign funds.
The Supreme Court intervened in its 2014 Harris v. Quinn decision to strike down just such a corrupt arrangement in Illinois. And even if this new scheme were to survive judicial scrutiny, it seems unlikely that it would survive a good public shaming. But then, there are few bones that Biden is unwilling to throw to a dying base of organized labor.
In contrast, Biden’s infrastructure deal has saved all the good, meaty parts for the growth demographic of the Democratic base — the wealthier, whiter social and environmental Left, which has sprung up as the party’s blue-collar base has faded. These policy initiatives may not create jobs, but these folks already have jobs. This proposal is really just designed to appeal to their sense of moral superiority.
So great is the influence of this constituency that Biden’s so-called infrastructure proposal originally spent hundreds of billions obsessing over his stated goals of “100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035” and “net-zero emissions by 2050.” To that end, many of its priorities come straight from the pages of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous Green New Deal. Fully $213 billion was dedicated to green construction.
Many of its proposals would create what can only be called busy-work jobs, and at great cost. For example, it is hard to imagine just how one could get less stimulative bang for one’s $27 billion than by using it to retrofit perfectly adequate homes and commercial buildings.
It’s really as if Democrats learned nothing from the $5 billion home energy efficiency program in former President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. According to congressional investigators, there was a “stunning lack of oversight of this program” at the Department of Energy, with “no one checking the quality of the work performed, allowing poor workmanship to go undetected and undeterred.” Many contractors, their report stated, “did not do the work promised by DOE and many of them actually damaged homes, created hazards, hazards and actually made houses less energy efficient.”
Nor, as the Wall Street Journal’s editors observed, does anyone appear to have learned from the $1,973 per apartment that it recently cost the New York City Housing Authority to have unionized electricians do something as simple as install LED lights. Biden hopes to spend $40 billion on such green projects in public housing.
When the administration killed the Keystone XL pipeline, it was eliminating infrastructure jobs in the short run that cost the taxpayers nothing, all the while constricting the economy in the long run. But with his infrastructure bill, Biden promises to spend $35 billion on clean energy research that may not produce anything for decades and may never produce a single job.
And “green jobs” are no substitute for the good-paying jobs that environmentalists want to abolish. The closure of turbine manufacturer MFG in South Dakota, attributed in large part to foreign competition, is a reminder that the wages of wind turbine production are not the good wages that Biden is promising when he talks about manufacturing jobs “modernizing power generation and delivering clean electricity.” More than half of all new global wind capacity is already built in China. If it can be built in China, then it won’t pay too much more than what Chinese workers make, plus shipping.
Another very short-sighted proposal is Biden’s plan to extend the renewable investment and production tax credit as part of the plan to phase out all fossil fuel electricity by 2035. One might believe that this cannot make things too much worse — after all, it is just an extension. But for context, these credits often let renewable producers sell their electricity profitably for nothing. This undercuts more reliable electric producers using nuclear and natural gas. The folly of this should be evident.
In February, when uninsulated natural gas pipelines failed in Texas due to freezing weather, the state could not compensate because so much of its generation capacity, (a nation-leading 17% of the total) was wind power. Wind cannot be counted on in such weather conditions. The excuse made repeatedly by the apologists, that the state’s wind capacity was not expected to produce much electricity that day anyway, only begs the question. Maybe wind has a role, but if it cannot be relied upon when you really need it, why subsidize so much of it instead of letting it grow at market prices? Wouldn’t you rather have a grid whose capacity is always available to make up for sudden shortfalls? All those freezing Texans probably would.
In the end, Biden’s infrastructure plan was too ambitious in redefining “infrastructure,” and not very ambitious about building it up. Much like AOC’s Green New Deal, it was not really about its stated purpose, but a thinly veiled effort to change society, to reward friends, to mollify zealous environmentalists, and to reshape and fix an economy that didn’t need it because it was not broken in the first place.
If Biden finally lets himself be dragged into a smaller infrastructure package, one that focuses more tightly on infrastructure, it will only be because Democrats need a few more votes in the Senate before they can misbehave as they would like.
