by Jason Lewis
Never before has so much ‘infrastructure’ been funded and so little built.
Unless, that is, you label Pete Buttegieg’s ‘paternity’ leave as ‘human infrastructure.’ Which, by the way, is exactly what the Biden administration did with its trillion dollar infrastructure boondoggle in 2021.
For those of you caught in another hours-long traffic jam on a crumbling highway (or worse, stuck at the airport), that may not be much consolation.
Even the liberal Brookings Institution admits just a third of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) went toward highways, roads and bridges. As a result, the Penn Wharton Budget Model said the bill “would have no significant effect on GDP by end of the budget window (2031) or in the long run (2050).”
Not only did the Biden administration pass it, but they massively sweetened the tax credit for ‘qualifying’ (Teslas are out) EVs under the Inflation Reduction Act. This is a subsidy going toward wealthy owners of vehicles who produce no gas tax revenue for the dwindling Highway Trust Fund (HTF) that builds the roads EVs drive on.
Nevertheless, EVs continue to pile up on dealer lots.
Upwards of 25 percent of trust fund spending is diverted to non-highway projects, the worst offender being the Mass Transit Account that builds expensive, ineffective — and now dangerous — urban rail projects. The ‘infrastructure’ bill continued to prop-up transit, but so did COVID relief legislation once the politicians saw what was happening to ridership after they locked down the labor force.
Here too, the proverbial free-ride is evident as the few remaining users of these shiny new projects pay only a fraction of their billion dollar price tags. Yet they’re still getting their Amazon deliveries via roads and bridges financed by automobile drivers who drove a record 276 billion miles in September.
Add it all up and no one should be surprised the Treasury Department is calling for another general fund bailout for the insolvent HTF. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped Biden administration officials from forging ahead (unilaterally) with emission standards designed to get gas-fired cars off the road — despite a precipitous drop in tailpipe emissions.
Onerous fuel efficiency requirements (that only a hybrid can meet), combined with fewer federal leases for oil and gas production, and you can see what Democrats are trying to do — end America’s love affair with the freedom of the road. They’ve said as much.
Indeed, if they really cared about actual infrastructure, they wouldn’t be depleting the highway trust fund by eliminating the internal combustion engine. Instead, they’re demonizing ‘gas-guzzlers.’
Meanwhile, Occidental is being forced to spend upwards of a billion dollars to ‘recapture’ an inert gas from the air and bury it underground. It’s part of the net-zero climate nonsense that taxpayers are subsidizing through, you guessed it, the ‘infrastructure’ bill.
Consumers are picking up the rest at the pump.
Believe it or not, this war on mobility has an even more sinister goal. Refusing to build roads and bridges where people want to live is only one tactic.
For some time, ‘urban planners’ have sought to contain ‘sprawl’ away from the decaying cities they help manage and into the suburbs. They’ve come up with so-called ‘smart growth’ slogans like ‘you can’t build your way out of congestion’ — as though refusing to build more lane miles helps untangle traffic snarls.
‘Urban growth boundaries’ erected by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) from Portland to Nashville also drive up the cost of land right out from under first-time home buyers. Check out housing prices lately? The only slogan that comes close to describing this insidious ‘new urbanism’ is ‘we’ve destroyed the city and we’re not letting you leave.’
What does survive for suburban habitat is relegated to hi-density ‘affordable housing’ crammed in alongside mass transit stations so as to “advance racial and economic equity across the metropolitan area,” at least according to the Twin Cities’ unelected Metropolitan Council.
But it’s happening all over the country. As high taxes, poor schools and record crime hollow out the inner city and retailers flee downtown, woke MPOs remain intent on doing for the ‘burbs what they have done for the city.
President Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Ben Carson, started to roll back some it, such as the Obama-Biden Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rules that racially map out community demographics for ‘equity.’
My opponent in the 2020 Minnesota Senate race, the militant Tina Smith, launched a new housing quota plan (reminiscent of Obama’s shakedown of New York’s Westchester County in New York) under the auspices of her Mapping Housing Discrimination Act.
While in Congress I authored a House bill to abolish the Met Council in its current form, but it was saved by the likes of Senator Smith and her corporate cronies who continue to reap big benefits from every federal contract that worsens the infrastructure crisis.
Meanwhile, our roads, rails, airports, pipelines, locks and dams are either underbuilt, or in the case of East Palestine, falling apart. Unprecedented deficit-spending on everything except what gets us around is the biggest reason.
The fact is our nation’s real infrastructure is overwhelmed but as long as Transportation Secretary Buttigieg says highways are “racist” and is more concerned with ESG scores, carbon offsets and finding a babysitter for his next vacation, nothing much will change.
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Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press.” He also writes at jasonlewis.substack.com. This commentary first appeared on Lewis’ Substack page: https://jasonlewis.substack.com/p/planes-trains-and-automobiles.
