Infrastructures come back to the fore | Business

Thirteen House Republicans voted in favor of the infrastructure bill that is now on its way to President Biden’s office. That may not sound like many, but given the intensity of Republican partisanship – the loser in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race has yet to admit defeat – even getting that many Republicans back an initiative that could help Biden is already a challenge. triumph.

This vote implies that politicians believe what the polls indicate: that repairing roads and bridges, expanding the broadband system and improving other things is immensely popular, and that opposing the law would pay them a political price. (Six Progressive Democrats voted against the bill, although Nancy Pelosi, who claimed to have a “secret recount of those responsible for party discipline,” could have gotten some of those votes had she needed them.) But if infrastructure spending has a political pull, why wasn’t it under Donald Trump? The Trump administration first declared Infrastructure Week in June 2017, but no legislative proposal ever materialized, and by the time Trump lost the presidency the phrase had already become a national joke. Why?

It wasn’t just because of incompetence. Most importantly, the current Republican Party is constitutionally unable – or perhaps, given its recent behavior, should we say unconstitutionally unable – to invest in America’s future. And sad as it is to say, pro-business Democrats, whom we really should stop calling “centrists,” have some of the same problems.

Trump talked a lot about infrastructure during the 2016 election campaign. But the “plan” presented by his advisers – it was actually an ambiguous outline – was a mess. It wasn’t even really a public investment proposal; it was largely an exercise in buddy capitalism, a taxpayer-subsidized private investment scheme that, like the “opportunity zones” that were part of the 2017 tax cut, would have ended up benefiting wealthy developers enormously. . Furthermore, it was completely unfeasible.

If Trump had wanted something real to happen, he would have had to turn to people with some idea of ​​what they were doing, who at least knew how to write laws. But he was unwilling to work with Democrats, and some key Republicans in Congress – Mitch McConnell in particular – consistently opposed significant investment in infrastructure. Why this opposition? Apparently, it was due in large part to the way the additional expense was covered. The Republicans were opposed, of course, to applying new taxes, especially to big business and the rich; they also claimed to be against additional government indebtedness.

But the first rule of deficit policy is that no one really cares about deficits. Of course, Republicans didn’t care when they hastily passed a $ 1.9 trillion tax cut with no cost savings to offset. The handful of Democrats who continue to resist Biden’s Rebuild Better plan, which would invest in people as well as steel and concrete, have delayed the vote by demanding a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. But they don’t seem to mind the fact that the physical infrastructure law is going to be paid for in part under pretense and deception, and that the Budget Office estimates it will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit.

Coincidentally, many economists now believe that, given such low interest rates, we shouldn’t really worry about deficits. But that doesn’t stop politicians from selectively invoking deficit fear to block public investment programs they don’t like.

For mainstream Republicans, that basically means opposing anything other than military spending. Everything else is “socialism,” which for the right has come to mean spending money in any way that helps ordinary citizens. In fact, it is quite clear that what conservatives fear is not that the new public programs will fail; they fear that these programs will be seen as a success, and that this will help legitimize a broader role for the government in tackling social problems.

In other words, they are concerned that public programs that help citizens could turn us into a “country of parasites”, and perhaps even a country that taxes the rich to pay aid to the needy. With this attitude, the only way that Trump could have pushed through an infrastructure law would have been to ignore much of his own party and work with the Democrats. But as I have already said, I was not up to the task of doing it.

Unfortunately, the handful of Democrats who could still kill the Better Rebuild plan seem to share the Republican unwillingness to invest in the future, albeit more moderately. They are willing to spend on infrastructure, even with borrowed money. But social spending is holding them back, even though there is strong evidence that such spending would help the economy enormously. Why? Well, Joe Manchin says he is concerned that we will become a “subsidized society.”

However, at this point, unleashing this nonsense would have enormous political and human costs. Biden’s ability to finally get through the infrastructure bill that Trump failed to achieve in four years is a practical lesson in what can be accomplished if we set aside the ideologues and supporters of patronage capitalism. Now the Democrats should finish the job.

Paul Krugman He is a Nobel Prize in Economics. © The New York Times, 2021. News Clips translation