“even a quite generous accounting still suggests that only a little more than half of the bill is targeted at anything that meets the definition of infrastructure, and that includes projects like $111 billion for drinking water and $328 billion for upgrading military health facilities and other federal buildings. As Politiconotes, those sorts of projects involve some amount of physical building and construction but have never been previously categorized as infrastructure.
The plan also includes a lot of spending on stuff that doesn’t even remotely count as infrastructure. For example, the proposal includes about $590 billion for vaguely defined job training, research and development, and industrial policy, as well as another $400 billion for expanding and supporting home health care. That’s about $1 trillion in non-infrastructure spending in a supposed infrastructure bill.”
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“even if you just confine your analysis to the parts of the bill that are actually infrastructure, what you find is that it’s chock-full of provisions that almost seem intentionally designed to make big infrastructure projects much slower to complete and much more expensive.
As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi wrote, the plan includes “Buy American” and prevailing wage provisions that would drive up the already-high costs of infrastructure and funnel a lot of money to the unions that support Biden, and that Biden has repeatedly said he supports. To the extent that American infrastructure has problems, it’s partly because of comparatively high construction costs that make projects more difficult to build. Instead of attempting to solve that problem, Biden’s infrastructure plan would make it worse.”
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“at its heart, it’s not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a payoff plan for Biden’s labor allies. And that helps explain the non-infrastructure parts of the plan too. The $400 billion for home health care would heavily benefit the Service Employees International Union.”