“Carr blames the delay on “the addition of a substantive wish list of progressive ideas” to the approval process. In an April 2023 letter to Davidson, 11 Republican U.S. senators warned that “NTIA’s bureaucratic red tape and far-left mandates undermine Congress’ intent and would discourage participation from broadband providers while increasing the overall cost of building out broadband networks.”
Among several examples, the senators noted that NTIA’s BEAD proposal “requires subgrantees to prioritize certain segments of the workforce, such as ‘individuals with past criminal records’ and ‘justice-impacted […] participants.'” The infrastructure law that authorized the program merely required contractors to be “in compliance with Federal labor and employment laws.”
The previous year, in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Republican senators warned that the NTIA’s proposed BEAD rollout “creates a complex, nine-step, ‘iterative’ structure and review process that is likely to mire State broadband offices in excessive bureaucracy and delay connecting unserved and underserved Americans as quickly as possible.”
In practice, this is exactly what’s happening: Multiple representatives from the telecommunications industry told MinnPost this week that they had no interest in applying for a piece of Minnesota’s $652 million in BEAD grants. Brent Christensen, president and CEO of Minnesota Telecom Alliance, which represents 70 Minnesota telecom companies, said, “None of them would bid for the federal grants because of the regulations that would come with it—especially the requirement to provide low-cost services to low-income households in exchange for grants that would allow internet providers to build out their networks.”
MinnPost noted that new state laws also “requir[e] companies who receive state grants to pay workers a ‘prevailing wage,’ a basic hourly rate paid on public works projects to a majority of workers in a particular occupation.” Since the federal government’s prevailing wage list does not include telecom workers, “companies in Minnesota would have to pay more because they would have to use a similar, but higher-paying, classification.”
“The solution to the national debt lies in reevaluating and cutting back on unnecessary and wasteful programs, reforming entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and implementing a more efficient tax system that encourages economic growth.
But none of this can even begin to happen until politicians perceive a demand for it from the American people. Rising debt reduces investment and can slow economic growth, while increasing worries about inflation and the strength of the U.S. dollar. It reduces confidence in the social safety net and increases the risk of a fiscal crisis. Perhaps when these problems manifest, the voters will demand that politicians take the issue seriously. But by then, it may well be too late for the economic stability and growth we have taken for granted.”
“In 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles (E.V.s) across the country in an effort to boost a switch to the use of clean energy.
As Reason reported in December, not one charger funded by the program had yet come online. Now, six months later, the number of functional charging stations has ticked up to eight.”
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“Why so little progress? Alexander Laska of the center-left Third Way think tank told Autoweek’s Jim Motavalli that the federal cash “comes with dozens of rules and requirements around everything from reliability to interoperability, to where stations can be located, to what certifications the workers installing the chargers need to have.” Laska says the regulations “are largely a good thing—we want drivers to have a seamless, convenient, reliable charging experience—but navigating all of that does add to the timeline.”
A spokesperson with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which administers $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, further told Motavalli that the delay is because “we want to get it right.””
“At its current trajectory, the rising national debt—and the increasing burden of making interest payments on it—will reduce Americans’ future income growth by 12 percent over the next 30 years, the CBO projects in a new report. That means the average person will earn about $5,000 less annually than they would in a scenario where the debt was not growing.
“This is the result of crowding out, whereby a higher national debt reduces private investment and slows income growth,” explain the number crunchers at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that advocates for reducing the federal deficit. “With additional debt, income growth would slow further.””
“”If reelected, Donald Trump has said he’s willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to deport the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country,” Kristen Welker asked of Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) on NBC News’s Meet the Press. “It would be the largest deportation operation in American history. Do you support that plan?”
“Yes, we are going to have to do something,” responded Rubio after arguing that the number of undocumented migrants is much higher. “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to do something dramatic to remove people from this country that are here illegally, especially people we know nothing about.”
A son of Cuban immigrants and, at one time, strongly critical of Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship and otherwise restrict immigration, Rubio’s turnaround matches the direction of his party, which takes a hard line on the issue. But if Trump plans “the largest deportation operation in American history”—his own words, adopted by Welker—we can assume that such a big-government scheme will come with matching costs. That’s exactly what number crunchers predict.”
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“”The costs of the former president’s plan to deport the more than 14 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. today could easily reach more than $1 trillion over 10 years, before taking into account the labor costs necessary for such a project or the unforeseen consequences of reducing the labor supply by such drastic amounts over a short period of time,” MarketWatch’s Chris Matthews reported this week of the results of a Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) analysis.
Trump’s plan is still taking shape, though the former and perhaps future president has proposed using both the military and local law enforcement to eject migrants in this country illegally. If that policy was put into effect, “the removal of one million immigrants would cost the federal government between $40 billion and $50 billion over 10 years, and up to $100 billion if those immigrants were higher-paid workers,” Matthews wrote of PWBM’s finding.
Matthews notes that immigration hawks like Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), predict as many as one million deportations per year under tough enforcement. That’s quite a reach, considering that deportations peaked at an average of 383,307 per year under former President Barack Obama. A dramatically higher target means rapidly accumulating costs, with the trillion-dollar price potentially reached after a decade.”
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“”Under current law, unauthorized workers…generally do not qualify for federal benefits,” PWBM economists point in a separate analysis. They add that “more deportations, though, leads to less economic growth.” As a result, according to PWBM, with the implementation of restrictive policies, “GDP in 2050 will be four percent lower relative to no additional deportations.”
AAF predicted that with deportations, “the labor force would shrink by 6.4 percent and, as a result, in 20 years the U.S. GDP would be almost 6 percent lower than it would be without fully enforcing current law.”
In 2017, the Center for Migrant Studies cautioned that with a mass deportation program, “gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.”
Obviously, there’s a range of costs projected for a policy shift to mass deportations of undocumented migrants. That’s because it has never been tried on the scale envisioned by Trump and his supporters. In fact, if Rubio is correct that the real number of people in the country in defiance of the law is “upwards of 20, 25, maybe 30 million,” deportations will have to be that much more aggressive, with an even higher price tag to match.”
“Less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion those laws provided for direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure has been spent as of April, nearly two years after Biden signed the last of the statutes.”
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“Trump has said he should have the power to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated money he considers wasteful, despite a 1974 law that says otherwise. This raises the prospect that he could attempt to pare Biden-era funding even if it’s at an advanced stage of distribution.”
“”Households who buy government debt reduce their savings in productive private investments,” Kent Smetters and Marcos Dinerstein wrote in 2021 for the Penn Wharton Budget Model. “As the spending is unproductive, the economy is poorer and total savings is lower due to capital crowd out.”
“Government spending redirects real resources in the economy and can crowd out private capital formation,” they add. “An additional $1 trillion debt this year could decrease GDP by as much as 0.28 percent in 2050.”
If you take that insight and apply it to a world of governments on a collective borrowing spree, you end up with a hobbled global economy where prosperity becomes increasingly elusive.
“Medium-term growth rates are projected to continue declining on the back of mediocre productivity growth, weaker demographics, feeble investment and continued scarring from the pandemic,” note IMF’s Adrian, Gaspar, and Gourinchas. “Projections for growth five years ahead have fallen to the lowest level in decades.”
Heavy government borrowing also creates risk for the financial sector by putting banks at the mercy of massive debtors of uncertain creditworthiness. “The more banks hold of their countries’ sovereign debt, the more exposed their balance sheet is to the sovereign’s fiscal fragility,” note the IMF analysts.
Heavily indebted governments also reduce their ability to act as backstops in case of financial crisis as they become the likeliest causes of crises of the future. As they continue to borrow, they reduce the likelihood that productive private economic activity will grow them out of their financial problems.
“Higher government debt implies more state interference in the economy and higher taxes in the future,” The Economist points out in its interactive overview of global government debt. Also, add the editors, rising debt “creates a recurring popularity test for individual governments” which often goes poorly in terms of fiscal responsibility because paying outstanding bills isn’t popular with voters.”