Sure I can. For example, suppose we spend that $2,300,000,000,000 and end up with 1,000,000+ $2,000,000 bike shelters, like the one at the East Falls Church, Va. Metro station. Since that shed, the time that I visited it, was only utilized to, you know, 2% capacity, a lot of people—mostly Republicans, of course—might think we didn’t get our money’s worth.
The fact that such a stupendous—“stupendous” as in “not remotely plausible”—proposal can even be made at all is “interesting”. All of my life—and I’m 75—Democrats have been dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of a “Second New Deal”, only to be disappointed, over and over and over again. And now we are getting at least two New Deals, if not three, all piled on top of one another. What gives?
What has given is the Republican Party, which now has the intellectual consistency of wet tissue paper, single-ply. In fact, the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republicans has been an all but open secret since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan, though he talked endlessly about how much he “hated” big government, had absolutely no interest in cutting it, so he never did, but found, in the Cold War, the perfect excuse for not doing so, which in turn gave him “every reason” to make the “danger” posed by the Soviets as monstrous and as imminent as possible. But then the mighty Russian bear suddenly shriveled into a mewling and puking puppy and deprived the GOP of its raison d’être. The purposeful Reagan was replaced as the Republicans’ leader by the nihilistic Newt Gingrich. Since the GOP actually stood for nothing, it had to do so as ferociously as possible, lest their bluff be called.1
Now, of course, the Republicans have talked out of so many different sides of their mouth all at once that they’re tongue-tied. Mitch McConnell spends half his time sticking pins in a Donald Trump doll he bought from Madame Hoodoo, and the other half sticking pins in his Nancy Pelosi doll. As a result, Sleepy Joe Biden is running rings around John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama combined. Which, unfortunately, is not as good a thing as one might wish.
Because the shocking fact is that the record of liberal Democrats when it comes to “infrastructure” is pretty fucking awful. Back in 2017, New York City spent $3.5 billion to build a single mile of subway track, which, the New York Times said, was seven times higher than the average cost incurred in such projects anywhere else in the world. New York is also “unique” in requiring each subway train to have two operators rather than one, each drawing an average of $150,000 a year in salary. The Obama Administration’s recovery efforts, made when the U.S. was actually in a crisis, were largely scandal free, but did manage to waste at least half a billion dollars on “high tech” streetcars—the streetcars to nowhere that amounted to nothing more than dysfunctional buses. If we didn’t often spend money for the sake of spending money, our infrastructure wouldn’t always be so “crumbling”.
Since we aren’t in a “crisis” now—the economy is clearly recovering and would recover faster if liberal Democrats would give up on their compulsion to keep telling everyone what to do—it is entirely unsurprising that Democrats would see this an opportunity to build political support among populations where they are particularly vulnerable, notably the white working class, particularly those located in rural areas. However, since those populations are hurting precisely because the industries they previously relied on are declining, this can amount to little more than an industrial policy that picks losers instead of winners—which is what governments almost inevitably end up doing, because “winners” aren’t complaining; they just want to be left alone.
“The King can never do his business as cheaply as another man,” observed Samuel Pepys, the 17th century Chief Secretary to the English Admiralty under the later Stuarts.2 Because “the King”, the government, always has multiple fishes to fry. The less the urgency of the matter, the more likely it is that a government’s ostensible goal—like building a subway—will amount to nothing more than spending money to generate political good will. It is easy to believe that 90% of the people involved in spending that $3.4 billion in New York did not care that only a mile of track was actually completed, in fact only cared that one mile was completed because they knew that if no track at all were completed the public outcry would be deafening.3 As far as they were concerned, the purpose of the project was to spend money.
A similar project is struggling on the other side of the country, a grandiose high-speed rail project to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles (382 miles), currently whittled down to Merced to Bakersfield (164 miles), while the cost has doubled, from $33 to $67 billion, and the 2020 deadline has, of course, already passed. Furthermore, one can bet the projected speed, around 200 miles an hour, will not be met, and, in fact, will be closer to 100 than 200.
Any large-scale government spending project attracts a host of “gate keepers”—interested parties who, to prove their worth to their constituents, must get a piece of the action. The Democrats, being the “coalition” party, is particularly vulnerable to these groups, and the overt political goal of currying favor with the supposedly neglected white working class, particularly those located in “declining” economic areas—areas where one might even say there is no reason to expect economic growth to occur—all but guarantees that the first priority will be to spend money as an end in itself. And the fact that the Biden administration intends to be aggressively union friendly also guarantees that labor costs will be as high as possible.
The “infrastructure” part of the infrastructure package is, notoriously, not the reason why Uncle Joe got to $2.3 trillion. There is also universal prekindergarten, free community college, and, of course, the environment, along with massive provisions for elder care. The first three reflect the common liberal conviction that if you spend a lot of money on something, you have to get a return. But this simply isn’t the case. We have had a substantial federally funded prekindergarten program since the 1960s, Head Start, which has served over 20 million children, with negligible educational results.4 In fact, Head Start stopped running evaluations on the program’s impact on students’ subsequent educational performance because there was, in effect, no point in paying for bad news. In New York City, Mayor de Blasio’s universal pre-kindergarten is widely praised, but there is no evidence available yet that the program is “working”, because the kids are just entering school. It is likely that these programs will function much more as child care than actual education programs, and one can wonder if they will have any educational impact at all.
Free community college is a tougher call. According to a Census Bureau report from 2020, the percentage of Americans with four-year college degrees has increased from 30% in 2010 to 36% in 2019. Presumably, free community college would boost this trend. Certainly, having a college degree is strongly associated with higher earnings. The disruptions caused by COVID-19 may generate a rethinking of educational methods that could increase efficiency for a woefully inefficient system. As long as they don’t rely on Dr. Jill’s dissertation for their blueprint, it might work!5
To be a little less flippant, the enormous investments in U.S. education since both the A Nation at Risk report in 1984 and the “No Child Left Behind Act” in 2002, have not led to much improvement in student achievement, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, about which I used to write for 19 years. (I offered the fruits of my labors in an article entitled A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017. And if you’re looking for Part II, well, so am I.) There was, in fact, substantial improvement in the score gaps between Black and White students, and Hispanic and White students, as measured by the NAEP Long-Term Trend Mathematics and Reading Assessments, which go back to the early 1970s and were last administered in 2012. but all of that improvement took place by the early 1990s at the latest, before much of the increased spending took place, and the gaps still remain large today. Other NAEP asssessments, conducted as recently as 2019, have not shown improvements either. Whether expanded investments in post-secondary education, for community colleges in particular, is a pretty open question, or at least one I can’t answer.
The environment, I fear, is likely the biggest boondoggle of all, the beloved “moral equivalent of war” for so many “passionate” liberals, and likely to be a match for the Pentagon in wasteful expenditure. Biden is proposing a “global challenge”, but the last “global” meeting, the UN conference in the environment held in Madrid in 2019 was a pathetic failure, as Reason’s Ron Bailey explained at the time. (Ron briefly discusses Biden’s new proposals here) I don’t think the need for climate change is nearly as urgent as the liberal establishment does, something I probably bitched about most extensively here, though you have to skip down past my bitching about Democrats’ persistent failure to understand middle-class Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for universal health care. The one possible upside is that Biden’s commitment gives him a reason for getting along with China, and, hopefully, cutting back on the neo-Wilsonian moralizing that, it seems, is once more taking over American foreign policy. Trump alienated everyone with his “fuck you” diplomacy—everyone except Israel and Saudi Arabia—but he didn’t invade them to make them better people.
Afterwords
Paul Krugman casts a thoughtful eye on the difficulties of those “left behind” by globalism—West Virginia coal miners, for example—and remarks that President Biden’s plans for transitioning them to better-paying jobs in renewable energies like wind and solar, though well intentioned, are likely to be no more than that:
Sad to say, however, that preserving coal country will be hard. The historical record of place-based policies is, let’s face it, pretty dismal. And sustaining Appalachia will be especially difficult given the realities of the 21st-century economy, which seems to want to concentrate wealth generation in big metropolitan areas with highly educated work forces.
Paul concludes that “we should try”, which frankly strikes me as very bad advice, no matter how politically wise and indeed “necessary”, not only based on the prior experience that Krugman references but the simple fact that “green” jobs, even if they could be disproportionately leveraged into coal and gas country, still pay less than the old dirty and greasy ones, as Politico explains, in effect a “double” guarantee that much of Biden’s infrastructure expenditures will provide a negative economic return in the long run even if offering a positive political one in the short term.
What we should be doing is ending the war on drugs and other “victimless” crimes—e.g., prostitution—which simply guarantee monopoly profits for the ruthless and jail records for thousands and thousands of black and Hispanic young people, giving significant financial incentives to kids in their early teens6 to drop out of school—why study business math when you can make $50 a day serving as a lookout for a pusher?
What we should also be doing is eliminating extensive “occupational licensing” requirements for a variety of professions—from hair dressing to nursing—which are simply designed to reduce competition.
Most of all, of course, what we should be doing is drastically reducing exclusionary zoning and other forms of NIMBYism, such as rent control, height restrictions (city wide in DC), along with California’s infamous property tax freeze, all of which enrich existing property owners and rip off everyone else. Lower housing prices, which would make it easer for jobless workers to move to where the jobs are, would be much more efficient than trying to create jobs where there is no longer any reason for them to exist and would have an immensely beneficial impact on the economy as a whole.
A famous paper, Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation, by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, estimated that if three of the most over-NIMBYied urban areas in the U.S.—New York, San Francisco, and San Jose—were as open to development as the average American city during the years 1964-2009, U.S. Gross Domestic Product in 2009 would have been at least 3.7% higher than in fact it was, and as much as 8.7% higher. But in fact, Hsieh and Moretti were much too “conservative”. A recent review of their work by Bryan Caplan found that the true figures were far more dramatic: an increase in GDP of between 14% and 36%, which would be enormous—resulting in an increase in wages alone of between $1.3 and $3.4 trillion. Ilya Somin at the “Volokh Conspiracy” provides additional background. It is much to Biden’s credit that the infrastructure proposal contains some—though, unsurprisingly, only some—provisions to attack exclusionary zoning.
1. The Republican “platform” called for a variety of “self-denying ordinances”, like term limits and balanced budget amendments, rather than actual budget cuts, which Republicans never, ever voted for. Even the “Tea Party” at the height of its “rage”, never did so. The “sequestration” provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011 were intended as “placeholders”, to be replaced with specific spending cuts to be agreed upon at a later date. Anyone with half a brain, e.g., me, knew that Congress could never summon the nerve to actually “prioritize”—decide that one program was “more important” than another—and of course it never did. And when Donald Trump took office, Republicans unsurprisingly wiped their ass with the goldurn sequestration provisions, which were surely the work of that goldurn Muslim in the White House in the first place.
2. Pepys was a leading figure at the Admiralty, though not yet Chief Secretary, when the then English Navy endured its most humiliating defeat, the “Raid on the Medway”, when the Dutch Navy sailed up the Thames and burned most of the English ships in their slips, towing away the largest prizes, much to the embarrassment of Charles II, the “Merry Monarch”. Charles was notorious for his love of good times, but it isn’t clear if he was to blame for England’s vulnerability, since England had been hit by both a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague and the Great London Fire in the year before the Medway raid.
3. The actual project involves only about two more miles of track, to connect Grand Central to the Long Island Railroad Station.
4. The “positive” studies for Head Start that I have read, and I certainly have not read them all, show positive results, not for academic achievement but rather such measures as grade completion, lack of incarceration, etc., and accomplished this by relaxing the standard for statistically significant correlations, i.e., not using the “.05” level preferred by the U.S. government.
5. Jill Biden’s “dissertation” is not really a travesty, but it is trivial, and would be so even if it were done for a master’s, a sort of “practice” research paper that prepares you for doing real research, with the sort of bland policy prescriptions that can surely be heard at any and every community college conference ever held in the U.S.
6. Prosecutors have significantly less leverage with “juveniles” since they can’t be threatened with jail time, which makes them very attractive to “real” criminals.
