Biden’s ‘Infrastructure’ Scam

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 01, 2021

 

Even though I live in a big city, I am a big fan of being in the middle of nowhere.

 

But when you live in a place that is remote or rural or both, there are tradeoffs — in exchange for space and privacy and sitting in traffic jams only when they involve livestock, you give up some of the things that go along with having lots of people living close together. I love Terlingua, Texas, but it’s a five-hour drive from the nearest Starbucks — and, more to the point of this week’s news, the Internet service there isn’t great, at least in my experience.

 

President Joe Biden is proposing a multi-trillion-dollar “infrastructure” plan that actually isn’t all that focused on infrastructure — because bullsh** is the common currency of this realm — and one of the things high on his agenda is subsidizing broadband Internet connections for areas that don’t have them. By industry estimates, about 93 percent of Americans have access to a broadband connection, and those who don’t mostly live in remote and rural areas. There are many more Americans who have access to a broadband connection but choose not to pay for one. The Biden administration complains that high-speed connections are “overpriced,” based on . . . the careful thinking and analysis that one naturally associates with Joe Biden.

 

Lack of broadband connections is not, in reality, much of a national problem for the United States, and it is becoming less of a problem every year as Americans gravitate toward the metropolitan areas where the jobs and the capital are, along with the good broadband connections. But this kind of project presses all sorts of New Deal, TVA, rural-electrification buttons in Democrats of Joe Biden’s generation. Hence the slogan, “Broadband is the new electricity.” These are not super-imaginative people.

 

Expanding broadband access isn’t going to do much for unemployed or marginally employed people in rural areas, but it is a big, fat subsidy for people like me: work-from-home knowledge-economy types with a yen for that sweet Unabomber lifestyle and in need of fast Internet in the bunker. If Biden is successful, it will be a red-letter day in the history of federally subsidized misanthropy. Pour one out in memory of Florence King.

 

Political histrionics notwithstanding, improving broadband access in remote areas probably is not going to create a lot of good new jobs for locals looking to work remotely as intellectual-property lawyers or technology consultants — at best, it’s going to create some jobs changing tires on the new trucks of the intellectual-property lawyers and technology consultants (and magazine writers) who decamp from the big cities to the wide-open spaces. But the Democratic Party increasingly is the party of affluent, educated professionals, and the yuppies are going to get what they want, including subsidized broadband for their country homes.

 

One of the many other things they want is to not be the ones who actually pay for Biden’s infrastructure plan.

 

The Biden administration is proposing to pay for (“pay for”) this infrastructure lollapalooza by raising taxes on — sing it if you know the words, brothers and sisters! — rich people and corporations. And Democrats are cheering — with caveats.

 

House Democrats, led by representatives of some of the most affluent suburban communities in the United States, are demanding a tax cut for their constituents in return for supporting the Biden infrastructure agenda. At issue is the deductibility of state and local taxes against federal taxes. The 2017 Republican tax-reform bill capped SALT deductions at $10,000, which meant a tax increase of hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade, paid disproportionately by exactly the people Democrats are always saying should pay higher taxes: the well-off. The problem is that SALT deductions are a much bigger deal for suburbanites in high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey than they are for people living in lower-tax jurisdictions. If we follow the usual Democratic example and treat a tax cut as an expenditure, then getting rid of the SALT cap would mean spending hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the lifestyles of high-income people in high-tax areas.

 

In New Jersey, it’s pretty easy for high-income people living in the kinds of houses high-income people prefer to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year in property taxes on top of the state’s heavy income tax, which tops out at just under 9 percent. By way of comparison, residents of cities such as Austin pay similar property-tax rates to those charged in New Jersey but pay no state income tax, while residents of thriving cities such as Henderson, Nev., pay lower property taxes and have no state income tax. Nevada is not a particularly conservative state, but it practices a kind of benign-neglect libertarianism, whereas Austin embodies a political situation that hypothetically satisfies no one’s ideological priors but turns out to be pretty popular in the real world: red state, blue city.

 

The New York and California model — blue states, blue cities — is pretty popular, too, but it is a hell of a lot less popular if you have to pay for it yourself. Hence, the SALT handout.

 

The subsidies for rural broadband and the subsidies for expensive blue-state governance are two sides of the same coin: Both represent the efforts of Americans to push off the real cost of their lifestyle choices onto other people. Frédéric Bastiat understood this way back in the 19th century, when he wrote: “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” One of the things we are going to have to get our heads around in our shared life — a fact that we have to reestablish and re-learn to appreciate — is that Americans are genuinely diverse and have radically different ideas about what constitutes the good life. What works in Brewster County, Texas, does not necessarily work in Travis County, Texas, much less in Brooklyn. Any model of politics that attempts to impose an economically or culturally homogeneous regime on the glorious American mess is going to provoke bitter resistance and incite new culture-war confrontations. Federalism and localism aren’t aesthetic preferences or ideological leanings that come out of nowhere — they are peace-keeping mechanisms necessary to the stable functioning of a diverse society.

 

There are some things, including certain kinds of infrastructure and development, that we do together at the national level, either because we don’t have any practical choice (e.g., missile defense) or because it’s just a lot easier that way. Much infrastructure development and maintenance is properly a state-and-local concern — though we’re probably going to need a binding resolution from the United Federation of Planets to get New York City’s mass-transit situation sorted out — but there is a legitimate federal role to be played in some of that, too.

 

The problem is not federal infrastructure spending per se: The problem is “infrastructure” bills that are in fact political slush-funds. We go about infrastructure in a way that is precisely backward: Instead of figuring out, one project at a time, what needs doing and how to prioritize those demands — repaving this section of interstate highway, replacing that bridge — and then seeing what that all adds up to and making informed decisions about timing and tradeoffs, we come up with some silly round number — say, $2,000,000,000,000.00 — and then see if we can find a politically attractive way to shovel all that cash out the door. That is how you end up spending a lot of money on infrastructure without actually getting much infrastructure. It’s the national version of the paradox in which the roads of so many American cities are always being repaired but are never repaired.

 

And there are public-trust issues surrounding big infrastructure plans. The best Democratic infrastructure thinking is how you get plans for a kinda-sorta high-speed train connecting Bakersfield with Merced, so that the giant kangaroo rats in Famoso can take early-morning meetings with their clients in Chowchilla.

 

Any dummy can spend $2 trillion: Put the cash on the table, and somebody is going to figure out a way to pick it up. Some of those people will be government contractors, some of them will be farmers who are keen on a subsidy, some of them will be rich guys in the Hamptons who don’t want to be on the hook for the entire sum of their local taxes, and so on — there’s no shortage of constituencies eager for federal largesse. But we should not kid ourselves that moving money from one pocket to the other makes the nation as a whole wealthier. At some point, all of us — rural and urban, employer and employee, buyer and seller — will have to pay our own way.

 

Somebody is going to pay for Joe Biden’s $2 trillion bonanza, and my money is on you.