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.
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