I quite agree. But the old question becomes: where then do Democrats draw the line? He who fights monsters and all that.
Absolutely. That doesn’t mean there aren’t creative ways to push the attack and put the Republicans on the defensive rather than the reverse. Some of the younger Democrats are quite adept at that.
Today’s Republicans have no idea how to pass a bill or accomplish anything. They only know how to oppose, how to say “no” and how to obstruct. They have lost any ability to create, to build, to propose.
So yes, they controlled congress and the presidency. They didn’t know what to do then, other than to continue to oppose Democrats.
Oh, I can give you lots of reasons for opposing it:
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It will make global warming worse. These are all highly energy intensive projects that will increase current emissions of CO2, and either not pay it back for decades, or not pay it back at all because they have no CO2 reducing effect. I’ve been told we have to solve the problem in the next ten years. In ten years there will be more CO2 in the atmosphere with this bill than without it.
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It will exacerbate every negative economic trend going on now: indebtedness, labor shortages, material shortages, and inflation
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Nationwide train networks are the height of foolishness in North America. They’ve been tried and failed repeatedly. They make no sense economically or for slowing global warming. Especially in a world of electric cars they are a giant global warming fail.
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High Speed Rail is a boondoogle. Even worse for the environment, and such train networks will consume gobs of steel and concrete - both of which are major contributors to global warming, and high priced and in short supply. This is the worst time to build infrastructure I can think of.
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$65 billion to run fiber and copper broadband out to rural communities seems stupid when there is already a better solution coming with LEO satellites. At least four companies are planning satellite networks that will outperform rural broadband without energy-wasting digging and construction.
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The CBO scored it as adding $350 billion to the debt. That will damage the economy and lower growth somewhat.
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Given how much money will be spent, oversight will be difficult and this monstrosity of a bill will be full of waste, fraud and abuse. The budgets of many of these projects will run WAY over, as they always have. And unlike stimulus where the key is to get the momey out and some inefficiency can be tolerated, the labor a resources will have to be taken from existing work, and if it’s not as economically efficient will be a net drag on the economy. Even if it is, the damage done by poaching top people from existing projects in the private sector will do a lot of harm. Losing a project manager on an existing project can cost many multiples of the person’s salary. There is no pool of unemployed project managers or engineers or skilled laborers looking for work.
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The bill is full of monetary smoke and mirrors. For example, one of the reasons it ‘only’ costs $350 billion is that they are repurposing money already voted for under pandemic relief, such as the Paycheck Protection Program and small business relief. But that’s also borrowed (and printed) money. The best use of that momey right now would be to just take it off the Fed’s balance sheet, shrinking the money supply and choking inflation a bit. It’s not ‘found’ money, it’s just more debt that, lucky for them, was already voted on. But they could certainly just rescind it and use the money to pay down the current debt. So this really adds to the debt by the full amount, plus whatever cost overruns appear.
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It’s highly risky to spend this kind of money by gutting covid relief programs when we don’t kmow if we are going to see another wave and more lockdowns.
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It is the opposite of ‘stimulus’. When there is slack demand, the government can hire the unemployed, put money in their pocket and stimulate the economy. When there is a shortage of workers and material, every person that works on one of these projects will be poached from somewhere else where theynare already productive, and every dollar of resources used in these projects will exacerbate shortages, drive up the cost of materials for everyone else, and make inflation worse.
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It’s a political bill that will allocate a lot of money based on the clout of various politicians rather than objectively determining where the bang for the buck is.
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OPPORTUNITY COST. We all agree that global warming is a serious problem, but this bill does almost nothing about it. Sure, they wrap a lot of the language around global warming, because they know it’s popular to say that, but the actual effect on it from this bill will be to make it worse for a couple of decades, then just maybe make some things slightly better after that, There are lot of things you could do with that momey that would be FAR more effective. For example, $1.2 trillion could build 200 nuclear power plants, which would be enough to power the ENTIRE transportation system without a drop of fossil fuel in the mix. China is building 150 nuclear power plants over the next decade. We should be doing the same. We’re idiots not to.
You want to talk about an upcoming infrastructure disaster? California is shutting down the Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in 2023 or 2024. That provides 9% of California’s electricity, and they have nothing in the pipeline to replace it with, which ultimately means they’ll be burning more coal and natural gas. New York shut down Indian Point, which is now contributing to demand spikes for natural gas while Biden stupidly says he wants to shut down the Line-5 pipeline.
These are infrastructure problems that are way more serious than filling potholes or building fancy new trains, and they are completely unaddressed.
In the meantime, after the passage of this bill, good luck getting more new spending or more Covid relief if we need it. At this point it should be clear that printing more money to hand out will just drive inflation and that’s a tax on the entire economy. There are no free lunches.
You mean like the “shovel-ready jobs” that Obama promised that didn’t materialize?
We? Is Canada getting spending or COVID relief from the US?
We are doing the same nonsense. We’re waiting for Trudeau’s promised ‘stimulus and infrastructure’ bill. He’s even said “Forgive me, but I don’t really think about monetary policy” when asked how to pay for it.
One trick freaking ponies. A ‘stimulus’ with printed money is absolutely the last thing we want now, and the excuses for it completely contradict the Keynesian reasons we were given for the 2008 stimulus bills.
And if you are going to spend this money, this is the one time when paying for it 100% with new consumption taxes might make sense. At least then you might be helping to cool inflation a bit, instead of making it worse. But what they are doing - printing money then using it to increase demand during a supply shortfall and inflation - is the worst of all worlds. And both governments are doing it.
There won’t be a single job ‘created’, because in a labor shortage situation every job you ‘create’ will be a job that didn’t get created or maintained elsewhere. But governments love to ignore the destruction, because it’s diffuse and hard to see or attribute, but love to tout the ‘jobs created’ by some large project they can point to. And the second-order jobs lost are the ones that never got created because taxation robbed investment capital from the private economy.
Sounds like “we” need to cut taxes on the rich. Again. Eh?
Cool. We can look back in a decade and see whether these predictions hold up any better than your annual predictions of crippling inflation that date back to the War of 1812.
For the same record: the inflation we’re seeing right now is situational rather than systemic and will diminish when more normal times return despite any Biden bills.
Genuine frontier gibberish, Sam_Stone Johnson.
Tell you what: Let’s check back in a year from now. If inflation is below 4%, I’ll admit it was temporary and not a long term probkem. If it’s above 4% still you do the same.
Or if you don’t think those are reasonable numbees, tell me what you think are.
It’s a strange criticism, going after me about predicting inflation when the last inflation number came in at 6.2% - substantially higher than predictions.
Well, it’s actually Econ 101, but whatever floats your boat, Festus.
Nope. We are in a unique time and the insane actions of the right have already prolonged the mess far beyond where any reasonable person could have predicted. I’m comfortable saying that current inflation will not resemble the 70s but I offer no predictions about the depths right-wing idiocy will sink us to in the short run.
Gotta love this fucking gaslighting,
"Over 100 Democrat amendments have been approved by the Rules Committee while less than 30 Republican amendments have been made in order.”
Hey fuckwit? Without actually knowing how many amendments each side proposed those numbers mean fuck all.
I do wonder about this one. Seems too little too late. We’ve been using a cellular signal at the farm and will supposedly have access to Starlink in 2022.
Yeah, anyone wondering why the Republicans didn’t do an infrastructure bill themselves when Trump was president need to look at how long it took them just to pass their giant tax cut bill. Cutting taxes, particularly on the wealthy and corporations, is the signature move of the modern Republican party, and essentially everyone in the party agrees that tax cuts are the greatest thing ever.
And yet, it still took them almost a year to pass that bill.
Anything requiring actual thought? Forget it, not going to happen.
More importantly, why is the government going to spend that much to run broadband out to rural areas? There’s no national postal service-style mandate that all households have broadband. In the absence of that, where’s the benefit to the nation as a whole? If it’s not a nationwide benefit sort of thing, or there’s not a national mandate, then why aren’t the states funding it or letting the private sector deal with it?
Put another way, nobody owes rural areas broadband connectivity- they can generate their own demand and pay for it themselves, or have their own states pay for it. Personally, I’m not interested in paying a dime for some dickheads in Swisher County, TX to get internet, much less someone in South Dakota or Kansas.
It’s a great feel-good sort of thing to say “Everyone has a right to broadband”, but it’s something else to actually fund it. If nothing else, the government could get way more bang for their buck spending money to build out internet to underserved urban communities, than running broadband out in the very low population density sticks just for some sort of nebulous idea that “everyone” has a right to broadband.
It is increasingly seen as a utility and a necessity these days, like electricity or the Post Office.
Plus, it’s another government benefit to rural areas (Republican) that cannot afford it, paid for by citizens of urban areas (Democrat) who can. While the Republicans in the rural areas bitch about government welfare to others.