Yes. I was on the record opposing both his spending and tax cuts. I have always been consistent on the need for fiscal restraint.
Are you talking about the 1.9 trillion Covid bill that’s already done? I’m not. The Democrats want an additional 2 trillion ‘infrastructure’ bill, followed by another 3.5 trillion in spending on new benefits and entitlements they want to jam through in reconciliation. That’s a total of 7.4 trillion dollars in spending bills in one year. It dwarfs what Trump did.
We aren’t going to know that for some time, and I suspect it’s wrong. The early data from Republican states that ended the extra subsidy is that it sent workers over 25 back to work, but not workers under 25. But that makes sense. People still living at home can afford to stay away from the job, but people living on their own have rent to pay. And since they’ve been locked down but getting more than average pay, they have some money and don’t need to work. That won’t last.
And if maintaining this situation with government benefits drives inflation up, their real wages will go down, and every time you increase their pay with printed money you make the problem worse. Inflation is a real bitch once it gets out of control. Young people who didn’t live through the 70’s have no idea. But they’re likely going to learn soon.
The problem is on both parties, as it doesn’t seem like there is anyone left in Washington who cares about spending any more. But the Democrats are taking it to a whole new level.
It depends on which day you ask. Biden wants to expand Amtrack across the country, but his administration has also made noises about high speed rail.
You should read the train thread in great debates. Passenger trains are currently more efficient than the extant auto fleet. They aren’t nearly as efficient as an auto fleet made up of electric cars, And the efficiency of trains highly depends on the capacity factor. Trains that run half empty have ten times the BTU per passenger mile than a Tesla with one person in it.
A Tesla model 3 uses 271 BTU per mile. That’s pretty typical for electric cars. The best trains that run fully loaded all the time might get 600 BTU/passenger mile, and the worst tains can be over 3000, more than ten times worse than a Tesla with one passenger or forty times worse than one with four people in it. Amtrack averages around 1200 BTU per passenger mile, which makes it about five times worse than an electric car.
The trains will take decades to finish. By then, taking a train instead of an electric car or electric bus would be a net loss for the planet. And by then all our cars are supposed to be electric.
But while they are constructed, they will consume the most energy intensive materials around - steel and concrete - in massive quantities. Concrete is a major emitter of greenhouse gases, and is also in short supply. Building out a train system now will make global warming worse for 20 years, and then *maybe start paying back a small amount of the CO2 emitted during construction if the electric car thing falls through. But if we get the electric car future the Democrats are promising, the trains will be net energy sinks and CO2 emitters even after they are done. You would help save the planet by driving your electric car instead of riding a train with a big diesel electric locomotive up front.
To build this with printed money while resources are in short supply and inflation is growing is just crazy bad economucs and global warming policy.
Funny how those arguments didn’t work for Keystone XL or the critical pipelines Democrats are still trying to shut down in North America.
I always thought the point to shutting down pipelines was to choke off fossil fuels and make them more expensive to speed the transition to renewables. But when Democrats kill pipelines at home but approve them for authoritarian countries overseas, it looks incoherent. Or to crazy Republicans, like they are actually trying to sabotage their own country and transfer wealth to others, because that’s the net effect of this.
