Category Archives: News commentary

Last Monday, I predicted that if Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, Republicans in Congress would demand more cuts from the infrastructure bill. Nancy Pelosi apparently read my post, as she had the House hastily vote on the infrastructure bill just a few days after Youngkin’s victory. By passing the Senate bill unamended, Pelosi gave fiscal conservatives no opportunities to try to change the bill in conference. Before the Virginia election, Pelosi had been delaying a vote in order to pressure centrists to support the $3.5 trillion non-infrastructure bill, which will now be much harder to pass.

Passage of the infrastructure bill means tens of billions of dollars will be spent on needless and wasteful projects like this Seattle-area light-rail project. Photo by SounderBruce.

As passed, the infrastructure bill is really two bills: first, a reauthorization of federal spending on highways and transit; and second entirely 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 made up in order to get Congress do what it always does, which is throw money at problems. Continue reading →

Rather than pass the Senate-approved $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill, the House of Representatives decided to punt, instead extending existing surface transportation programs until December 3. At issue was not the infrastructure bill, which most people thought would pass, but the $3.5-trillion social-spending bill, which seemed much less likely to pass.

Progressives in the House demanded that both bill be voted on at the same time, effectively holding the infrastructure bill hostage in order to promote passage of the social-spending bill.

While the infrastructure bill is dubious enough, it has the advantage that roughly half the spending in the bill is one-time only, while the other half is merely an extension of spending that is already happening. The social-spending bill, however, proposes to create several major new entitlement programs, such as free child care, medicare expansion, and housing programs. The $3.5-trillion cost is only the estimated cost for the first ten years of the programs, but like Obamacare and other entitlements, they are likely to go on for many years beyond that. Continue reading →

America’s freight delivery system is melting down and Congressional action on infrastructure is stalled. So what has Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg being doing about these problems?

Nothing, it turns out. For the past two months, he has been on paid leave due to having two new babies at home. The thing is, no one even noticed until Politico pointed it out last week. Now many people, particularly Republicans, are in a tizzy, wondering why Buttigieg should keep his job if he isn’t doing it.

Some are asking a more pertinent question, which is: why do we even have a Department of Transportation? Most of its budget, which was $87.5 billion in 2021 not counting various COVID relief funds, was simply passed through from the Treasury to the states according to formulas set by Congress. That could have been done by the Department of Commerce, which oversaw agencies such as the Bureau of Public Roads before the Department of Transportation was created. Continue reading →

The House of Representatives passed a transportation reauthorization bill called the INVEST Act, but it really should be called the SPEND Act. Spending money is only an investment if the spender expects to get something in return for the cost, and much of the money in the INVEST Act will produce no real returns.

The bill, which has yet to be approved by the Senate, represents the normal reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund, meaning federal spending on highways and transit, which happens about every six years. Normally this mainly deals with how the gas taxes and other federal highway user fees are spent. But this year, the House has gone overboard, agreeing to spend $715 billion over five years, which more than twice as much money as the Highway Trust Fund is likely to collect.

Admittedly, part of that $715 billion includes $168 billion for water infrastructure, which has never previously been a part of a transportation reauthorization bill. It also includes $95 billion for Amtrak, which is also not from the Highway Trust Fund. Spending on highways and transit would total to $452 billion, which is still more than twice as much as is likely to be collected in highway user fees. The federal government collected less than $45 billion in user fees in 2019 and, since collections in 2020 and 2021 will be smaller, total revenues are likely to be less than $220 billion over the five years of the bill. Continue reading →

The share of “knowledge workers” who will continue to work at home after the pandemic is likely to double from before the pandemic, according to a new study from the Gartner management-consulting firm. If that can be scaled up to all workers, that means the share of people working at home is likely to go from about 6 percent in 2019 to 12 percent in 2022.

Home office photo by Jeremy Levine.

I suspect it will be even more. So-called knowledge workers were already more likely to work at home than people in other professions, and I suspect the telecommute shares of some of those other professions are likely to grow more. Another recent survey, for example, found that a full 25 percent of New Jersey workers are likely to continue working at home after 2021. Continue reading →