The infrastructure bill signed today by the President is no “Joe Biden victory,” but in fact was carved out of Biden’s original $5-6 trillion mass of proposed Keynesian spending, by Senators led by Shelley Moore-Capito, Joe Manchin, Cynthia Lummis, Kyrsten Sinema, and others of bipartisan habits like Lisa Murkowski. That carve-out, fought tooth and nail by Democratic leaders, enabled the first U.S. general infrastructure act since the ill-fated American Recovery and Reconstruction Act (ARRA) of 2009. Former New Orleans mayor and former Louisiana lieutenant governor Mitch Landrieu was named to coordinate it.
This bill includes a previously drafted five-year “highway bill” which has Federal gas tax and supplemental funding; and it is less “green” than the ARRA, but has a green-power “poison pill” which may cancel out its benefits. The largest investments include surface transportation improvements, $111 billion, including $17 billion in port improvements; $66 billion to upgrade Amtrak, including some high-speed rail development; public transit, $39 billion (about an average $1 billion per public transit system in the nation); airport improvements, $25 billion. Otherwise: broadband Internet, $65 billion including direct household subsidies for Internet bills in rural areas; water infrastructure, $48 billion; clean drinking water infrastructure, $55 billion.
