The only good thing about the infrastructure bill that Congress just passed is that it doesn’t include any money for high-speed rail. Unfortunately, it did include far too much money for things like Amtrak, urban transit, and rural broadband.

The infrastructure bill is really two bills in one: first, a reauthorization of existing federal spending on highways and transit; and second, brand-new spending on highways, transit, Amtrak, electric vehicles, airports, ports, clean water, clean energy, and broadband. This entirely new spending is almost entirely unnecessary as the infrastructure crisis was mostly fabricated in order to get Congress do what it always does, which is throw money at problems that are perceived to exist, whether they are real or not.