joe Biden – Page 37 – Lone Candle

No, We Don’t Need Biden’s $2.3 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Lone Candle

“while our infrastructure could certainly be modernized and could use some maintenance, it’s not crumbling. According to the World Economic Forum, U.S. infrastructure is ranked No. 13 in the world—which, out of 141 countries, isn’t too shabby, especially when considering the enormous size of our country and the challenges that presents.

Yet as Washington Post columnist Charles Lane notes, it would be more accurate to bundle European nations together, since they share a significant amount of infrastructure, which would move the United States into fifth place.

Moreover, while the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 report card gave the United States a C-, this is its best grade in two decades—meaning that the quality of roads, bridges, inland waterways, or ports has been improving each year, without a congressional rescue plan. This fact doesn’t quite fit the crumbling infrastructure narrative that politicians and the media like to tout.

Academics also refute the idea that infrastructure is crumbling. Reviewing a large body of research in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Wharton University economist Gilles Duranton and his co-authors state: “Perhaps our main conclusion is that, on average, U.S. transportation infrastructure does not seem to be in the dire state that politicians and pundits describe. We find that the quality of interstate highways has improved, the quality of bridges is stable, and the age of buses and subway cars is also about constant.””

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“in theory, government spending could lead to higher growth in the longer term. Unfortunately, legislators’ well-documented tendency to make decisions based on politics often leads them to favor projects that are outdated, expensive, and never profitable at the expense of private and profitable alternatives.”

Biden agreed to waive vaccine patents. But will that help get doses out faster?

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Lone Candle

“The Biden administration has announced that it will work with the World Trade Organization (WTO) to negotiate a deal to suspend intellectual property rights associated with the Covid-19 vaccines — a surprise move for the administration, which had initially resisted taking such a step.”

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“There is unanimous agreement on one thing: There is a lot of work to be done to speed up vaccine manufacturing and vaccinate the world. As the WTO’s General Council meets this week, patents have risen to the top of the agenda. India and South Africa have asked the WTO to waive intellectual property (IP) rules relating to the vaccines so that more organizations can make them.
The case for waivers is simple: Waiving IP rights might enable more companies to get into the vaccine-manufacturing business, easing supply shortages and helping with the monumental task of vaccinating the whole world. The case against them: Taking IP rights from vaccine makers punishes them for work that society should eagerly reward and disincentivizes similar future investment. Opponents have also argued this step would do very little to address the vaccine supply problem, which has largely been the result of factors such as raw material shortages and the incredible complexity and tight requirements of the vaccine-manufacturing process.”

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“debates over intellectual property can also distract the world from the policy measures that could really end the pandemic: building our vaccine-manufacturing capacity, committing to purchase the doses the rest of the world needs, and working directly with manufacturers to remove every obstacle in their path.”

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“Experts I spoke with emphasized that, generally speaking, the world’s entire supply of critical raw materials is already going into vaccines, and there are no factories “sitting idle” waiting for permission to start making them. What’s more, changing a factory’s processes to produce a new kind of vaccine is a difficult, error-prone process — which went wrong, for example, when a plant converted to make Johnson & Johnson vaccines spoiled millions of doses.

Moderna is an instructive example here. The pharmaceutical company made a splashy announcement in the fall that it would not enforce its Covid-19 vaccine patents. Despite that move, there is still no generic Moderna vaccine, and none of the experts I talked to believed one was on the horizon. (It turned out well for Moderna — get the PR bump from the announcement without suffering the financial drawbacks.)”

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“Although the Biden administration’s announcement is a win for the pro-waiver side, the US isn’t the only country that needs to be persuaded for the WTO to agree on a patent waiver. For their part, the EU, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland have expressed opposition. But the US is influential in these debates, and the Biden administration’s about-face may well be decisive.”

What Biden’s plan to tackle housing prices is missing

Posted on May 15, 2021 by Lone Candle

“Bans on duplexes, fourplexes, accessory dwelling units, and apartment buildings ensure that the only homes that get built are single-family residences that are necessarily more expensive. The laws that dictate this are referred to as “exclusionary zoning.” To estimate the impacts of these policies, one study looked at Silicon Valley, where demand to live surged starting in the 1970s (but population between 1970 and 2010 “grew at less than half the rate that California did”). At the time, house prices there were only slightly above the national median. But its suburbs undertook a “multifaceted” effort to restrict the types of homes that could be built and “limit further densification.” Now, half a century later, house prices in Silicon Valley are “commonly ten times the national median.””

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“As part of the $2 trillion infrastructure package the administration introduced last week, Biden proposed a “purely carrot and not stick” program to allocate $5 billion to a new competitive grant program that “awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”
The approach is similar to President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program for education, which also set aside a few billion for states to compete over. And in some ways, modeling zoning reform similarly to education reform makes sense — both have been designated as local issues, and a lot of the infrastructure for direct reform exists at the local level.

However, while with education everyone has the same goal of “better schools” or “better-educated children” even if they disagree on methods, not everyone agrees with the goal of ensuring abundant housing.

At the local level, cities and suburbs (often with a high proportion of Democratic voters) have enacted policies and procedures that drive up the cost of housing, often due to aesthetic preferences for single-family homes and the people who usually reside in them.”

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“Many of the most exclusionary localities are uninterested in the extra money changing these rules would give them. After all, they’ve already left potentially billions on the table: According to a 2015 study by University of Chicago economist Chang-Tai Hsieh and UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, researchers find that because metropolitan areas have made it prohibitively expensive for middle- and low-income Americans to move to high-productivity areas, US aggregate economic growth was lowered by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009.

“It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea; it just means that it’s limited in its ability to impact change,” Yonah Freemark, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, told Vox. “The fundamental problem we’re facing is the cities and suburbs that are most interested in excluding people are also the ones that are least needing of additional grants to pay for things.”

If Biden and his administration want to truly “eliminate exclusionary zoning,” as they claim, they’ll need a stick to go along with their carrot”

Biden is talking to Republicans, but for only so long

Posted on May 10, 2021 by Lone Candle

“As vice president, Joe Biden was among those repeatedly pushing President Barack Obama to negotiate with Republicans on everything from health care to fiscal crises — even if it led to delays, watered-down policies or nothing at all.

But these days, Biden and his team, many of whom worked in the Obama administration, are taking a different approach: Talking to Republicans, yes, but doing so with more skepticism and firmer deadlines”

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““The lesson that this team learned, beginning with President Biden, from that experience is that there is a cost to waiting too long,” said Jay Carney, who worked for Biden before becoming Obama White House press secretary, and is now an executive at Amazon. “I think everyone is much more realistic about whether bipartisan cooperation is possible.”

Biden, the aides and lawmakers say, believes action is more important than bipartisanship, and is convinced Americans will support him in his efforts. He recognizes that his window for this approach may close by the midterm elections. That’s why, the aides and lawmakers say, he may be willing to give up the reputation, cultivated over decades, as a dealmaking lawmaker if he can be a transformative president who pushes through a once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure and social programs.

The president will talk with Republicans about his new pair of proposed spending plans — a combined $4 trillion in spending designed to ignite economic recovery following the coronavirus pandemic — but he is prepared to back a congressional maneuver that would allow Senate Democrats to pass legislation without GOP support, perhaps within weeks, aides and lawmakers familiar with his thinking say.”