Highway to Hell
The infrastructure “compromise” is just funny accounting.
The infrastructure bills are working their way through Congress, and Republicans are indiscriminately blocking them. Take the surface transportation bills: $547b over five years, that passed with only one GOP vote in favor.
That might seem like a lot, but it’s just a re-authorization of existing spending. It doesn’t authorize a single cent of new maintenance and upkeep — it just continues the existing level of spending. Without it, America would stop maintaining its infrastructure altogether.
In other words, the entire GOP caucus (except Brian Fitzpatrick, R-PA) voted to zero out America’s infrastructure maintenance programs for the next five years.
https://prospect.org/politics/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-infrastructure-bills/
But don’t get too smug. Congressional and Senate Dems are also playing games with infrastructure, voting to let America’s rail, highways and bridges continue to crumble.
Take the bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus,” composed of Republicans who think they’re still in power and Democrats who wish Republicans were still in power.
They’ve announced a “compromise” infrastructure bill worth $1.125T — but it’s a scam.
That sum includes the existing budget for infrastructure (the inadequate sum that the GOP just voted against), bringing the true total down to $761.8b over five years.
This pattern — inadequate sums that are even lower than they seem at first, thanks to deceptive accounting — is repeated in every “bipartisan” effort to create an infrastructure budget.
The Senate “gang” of 5 Dems and 5 Repubs claim they’ve agreed to $1.2T in spending, but only $579B of that is new spending.
That Senate deal is such dogshit that it would be laughable, except that it’s being treated as serious. For one thing, it claws back covid money that’s been allocated to the states…for infrastructure spending, and it imposes a tax on electric vehicle drivers.
