How Many Trillions to Waste?

President Biden wanted to spend $2.25 trillion we don’t have on projects we don’t need. Republicans countered by saying they weren’t willing to spend more than $568 billion we don’t have on projects we don’t need. President Biden, desiring to show he was willing to compromise, offered to spend $1.7 trillion we don’t have on projects we don’t need.

Now the latest is that Republicans have agreed to spend “close to $1 trillion” we don’t have on projects we don’t need. Whereas Biden hinted that he would agree to raising taxes on corporations and people who earn more than $400,000 a year to pay for part of his plan, a key provision of the Republican proposal is that taxes won’t be raised on anyone to pay for it, thus absolutely ensuring we won’t have the money to pay for their infrastructure projects we don’t need.

It is easy to say that this is just politics, but I can’t help but feeling that everyone inside the Beltway has gone nuts. As I noted earlier this week, Democrats have successfully moved the goal posts so far out that Republicans think that spending nearly $1 trillion in funny money is a fiscally conservative proposal.

If we don’t have revenue, then printing money to fund these bills is generally expected to lead to inflation. After spending several trillion dollars we don’t have for the pandemic, much of which didn’t need to be spent, there are already signs of inflation “running hotter than expected.” Even CNN thinks that “Biden should be worried” about inflation, yet neither Biden nor Republicans seem to care.
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The other problem is that government spending on infrastructure is inevitably followed by more government spending on infrastructure. Without the discipline that comes with limiting spending to actual revenues, every project built in one part of the country leads to demands for similar projects from the rest of the country, no matter how stupid the first project turns out to be.

Portland built a light-rail line not because it made economic sense but because it had federal dollars that had to be spent on something or it would lose them. This example was quickly followed by Buffalo, Sacramento, and San Jose. Light rail costs exploded from around $20 million a mile for the first ones to well over $200 million a mile today, yet at least 25 different urban areas either have, are building, or planning to build light rail today. The same thing would have happened if California had been able to finish its high-speed rail: megacities around the country like Duluth and Cheyenne and Christiansburg would all demand their own high-speed rail lines.

This may be the best reason why transportation infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees: doing so keeps spending under control and helps ensure that projects built are truly worthwhile. Unfortunately, those who expect to profit from infrastructure spending have managed to generate an infrastructure crisis when no such crisis really exists.