RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Biden gets infrastructure bill passed

I think the bipartisan support it received despite the GOP’s increasing move to the extremist right speaks for itself. It wasn’t that long ago Trump was supposedly for an infrastructure bill like this one except it was for 2 trillion dollars. Honestly partisan fools that are only for something if it’s their party in charge look like the partisan fools they are. Our country needs to invest more into infrastructure at the end of the day. That was recognized as true when Trump was in office and is still true now that it’s Biden. Some things like national security and infrastructure need to be above petty bitter politics.

US Chamber of Commerce: Trump is wrong

US Chamber: Trump is 'wrong' on infrastructure bill
“ New York (CNN Business)Former President Donald Trump has blasted the bipartisan infrastructure legislation recently passed by Congress as a "Non-Infrastructure" bill.

Trump, long an advocate for infrastructure spending, put out a statement last weekend claiming that just 11% of the $1.2 trillion package is going toward "real" infrastructure. The former president, who repeatedly tried and failed to get an infrastructure bill passed when he was in the White House, argued Republican lawmakers should be "ashamed of themselves."
Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, told CNN that Trump is "wrong."
"There is a lot of misinformation going around about this bill, including that only a small amount goes to infrastructure," Bradley said in an interview.
…”

Almost half of Americans believe President Joe Biden hasn’t accomplished very much, if anything at all, during his presidency, according to a WaPo-ABC News poll released Sunday.

Of the 1,001 adults polled, 63% thought Biden had achieved “not very much” or “little or nothing” thus far, with 45% answering the latter. The figure is far greater than that of former Presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at similar points in their presidencies, Politico reported.
The poll was conducted after the House passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIF), which devotes approximately $1.2 trillion towards improving roads, bridges, ports, waterways, rural broadband access and more over the next decade.

The poll also showed that 51% of respondents would choose Republican House candidates over Democrats in their own jurisdictions, the highest percentage for the party since the poll first asked the question 40 years ago, Politico reported. This makes the figure higher than 2014, 2010 or 1994, which were GOP wave years.
President Biden Meets With Cabinet To Discuss Infrastructure Bill's Implementation
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House November 12, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Biden’s approval rating also dropped to 41%, according to the poll results, with 53% of respondents disapproving of the president’s work while in office. More, only 31% of respondents said Biden has kept most of his campaign promises, and 70% of respondents stated that the economy was “not so good” or “poor.”
However, 63% of respondents said they supported “spending one trillion dollar” on infrastructure, and 58% supported “spending about two trillion dollars to address climate change and to create or expand preschool, health care and other social programs.” (RELATED: What Do Americans Know About The Build Back Better Act?)

BIF passed in early November after lengthy negotiations between different wings of the Democratic Party in the House. Moderate Democrats gave a written commitment that they would vote for Biden’s $1.75 trillion spending package should the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score be aligned with White House estimates.
The thirteen Republicans who voted in favor of BIF are facing intense backlash from some within the party. Six Democrats voted against the bill.

President Joe Biden on Nov. 15 signed his infrastructure bill, a trillion-plus-dollar handout to left-wing special interests masquerading as a solution to the supply chain crisis he created.

The administration is touting the bill as a fix, but the truth is, the bill is at best irrelevant, and most likely will make the crisis worse, at an enormous cost to taxpayers.
The core of the supply chain crisis is a lack of capacity at ports and among truckers—and a historic shortage of workers, now at 10.4 million unfilled jobs nationwide.
Together, these shortages drive inflation, empty shelves of even basic goods, and shutter factories that can’t get the parts and inputs they need.

Rather than fixing this crisis, this bill instead uses it as an excuse to push a gigantic handout for special interests, radical left-wing activists, and unions. As a result, the money won’t be going where supply chains need it, but rather to irrelevant make-work projects that please activists and unions, such as subsidies for electric cars that have nothing to do with supply chains; to plowing hundreds of billions of dollars into tearing down and rebuilding Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s “racist” highways; to building trains to nowhere; and to bailing out failed urban transit.
This isn’t just about wasting money, however. Rather, these projects use up the resources and workers the private sector desperately requires to build capacity that’s actually needed.
For example, warehouses nationwide are at just 3.6% spare capacity—beyond their “capacity to even function properly”—yet they cannot expand because steel, concrete, and even construction workers are all in short supply.

Now, the federal government lumbers in with hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to outbid the remaining resources and workers for activist boondoggles, further starving the projects that are actually needed.
So, what’s in the infrastructure legislation?
The most important infrastructure problem at the moment is port automation, the lack of which makes California ports among the least efficient on earth—behind even those of Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania—and which unions have fought tooth-and-nail for decades.
Alas, the infrastructure bill specifically forbids money for automation, instead spending ports money on emissions reduction.

Even the useful bits of the bill, such as dredging, roads, and rail, go to projects that have little to do with actual supply chains. The $100 billion going to rail is almost all for subways, Amtrak handouts, restarting abandoned rural lines, or replacing at-grade train crossings. For roads, the money overwhelmingly goes to maintenance, not expansion, including tearing down and rebuilding those allegedly “racist” overpasses.
Some of these may be good housekeeping in the long run, but tearing up highways, bridges, and rails in the middle of a nationwide capacity crisis is like replacing one’s roof during a hurricane. It only makes matters worse.
Moreover, these hundreds of billions of dollars shouldn’t be decided by a remote federal government in the first place. State and local governments have a better idea of what’s needed, while the private sector actually has an incentive to build stuff people actually want.
What should the federal government be doing instead? Go where the problem is; namely, ports, truckers, and lack of workers.

That means telling port unions that automation is coming whether they like it or not, and replace them if they keep dragging their feet. It means standing down on activist-driven environmental and labor mandates that have knocked the vast majority of trucks out of California and threaten to take that nationwide.
Finally, it means stopping paying people to sit on the couch instead of taking one of the 10.4 million unfilled jobs—that is, no more benefits divorced from work, whether as stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, or “child allowance” payments as a shadow vote-buying universal basic income.

Unfortunately, all the real solutions would require Democrats to stand up to their special interests, the left-wing activists and unions. So, instead, they will likely continue this pattern of creating crises through incompetence, then using those crises as excuses to push more activist agendas—with American families left to struggle with rising prices, empty shelves, and shuttered factories.
As for this infrastructure bill, at best it will do nothing for the supply chain crisis, and most likely it will only deepen the crisis by hogging resources and disrupting struggling networks when we need them most.

Biden and Congress had an excellent opportunity to get out of the way, but they squandered it.
________________________________

Peter St. Onge is an economic research fellow in the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He holds a doctorate in economics from George Mason University.

By AMAC, Robert B. Charles


The Democrats’ pending $4.7 trillion dollar Infrastructure Bill is a compound deception, not limited to $4.7 trillion, not “paid for,” not infrastructure. Democrat strategy – like Obamacare – is to speak lies with conviction, demand loyalty, concentrate power, spread fear, jam it through.

First, $4.7 trillion dollars – the $1.2 trillion “bipartisan” Senate bill and $3.5 trillion House bill, represents unthinkable spending, raising our $28.7 trillion national debt by a sixth.

Understanding how irresponsible this is tests language. This is a 45 with 11 zeros behind it – or $4,500,000,000,000. Each dollar earned by an American is then taken or assumed as debt.

Key fact: The middle class – roughly 52 percent of the country in 2018, more in 2019, less in 2021 – pays the nation’s tax bill. That is you and me. No amount of “taxing the rich” will reduce accelerating federal debt and spending. See, e.g., Which Income Class Are You?.

On the numbers, in 2021, the top one percent of earners – making $540,000 – earned 21 percent of income and paid 40 percent of taxes, while the top 10 percent (upper-middle class) earned 48 percent of income and paid 71 percent of taxes.

Incredibly, more than 107 million Americans – 60.6 percent – paid no income taxes, 59 million collecting federal welfare. See, e.g., COVID-19 Tax Relief Added to Increasing Share of Households Paying No Income Tax; Straight Talk On Welfare Statistics.

Overall, the federal government administers 80 welfare programs (not including those to which Americans contribute, such as Social Security and Medicare). Congressional Research Service reports the top 10 federal welfare programs grew by 378 percent since 1990. See, e.g., United States Senate Committee on the Budget.

Taken together, the lower and upper-middle classes pay the bulk of taxes – as they work, are most numerous, and are neither top one percent nor the bottom 60 percent. Forty percent carry-all.

No matter what Democrats say, we – the middle class – will pay for massive new spending. Making matters worse, Democrats plan to raise tax rates, pushing unemployment up, too.

At the same time, mass federal spending and debt trigger inflation since more dollars get printed without increases in labor participation, productivity, output, growth, income, or wealth. In other words, the dollars you earn will be taken at a faster rate and then devalued, even as prices rise.

Labor unions will ask for more money, which accelerates price increases and employment cuts (to pay higher costs), which reduces overall consumer spending, further slowing the economy.

What does that do? A shrinking economy shrinks the tax base – giving the lie to assumptions of a robust economy “paying for” reckless federal spending. Separately, inflation pushes the middle-class into higher tax brackets. This $4.7 trillion bill is a macroeconomic disaster.

Second, while $4.7 trillion is a mess, things get worse. As the Wall Street Journal observed, this is NOT a $4.7 trillion dollar bill. That, too, is a deception.

The real cost is far higher. Democrats are playing with language, placing traps that force higher spending. The stated price is a phony number.

Why? Because “Democrats are grasping for ways to finance their cradle-to-grave welfare state.”
Beyond twisting “reconciliation,” the $3.5 trillion bill “hides the real cost of their plans.”

For example, the “child allowance” increase will cost $1.1 trillion over a decade but is extended only to 2025, with the expectation that dependence will force extension on the GOP.

Another trick is Medicare expansion, with limited benefits over two years, then spiking them in 2028, described as saving $500 billion, as the massive jump is delayed.

Another trap: The “universal child-care entitlement” gives $90 billion to states, but only for five years, enticing providers to raise costs yet only paying a seven percent of any family’s costs.

Elsewhere, the bill forces States to pay for “universal pre-K entitlement” costs over time. Ditto for mandatory “free” community college, which will be hard to reduce once online and will absorb students from paid educational institutions.

Other tricks, half-truths, time shifts, hidden lags, mandates, and pretend “savings” appear through the bill.
See, e.g., Dems’ reconciliation bill has a $6B transportation ‘slush fund’ that GOP aide warns could fund backdoor earmarks. The bill is a lie.

Truth: This bill does not come anywhere near paying for itself. As the economy slows, costs incurred with higher obligations, mandates, taxes, and debt will multiply, with inflation and job cuts.

Notably, the Wall Street Journal confirms “the press has reported none of this,” adding, “do not expect an honest accounting from the Congressional Budget Office.” The bill is pure deception.

Third, bill contents are a disgrace, not honestly presented. One-fortieth of the bill is “traditional infrastructure,” while 39 fortieths redefine “infrastructure” as socialist largess, packaged as “must-have” federal entitlements, subsidies, and program growth.

Examples: Countless Democrat “wish list” programs, including within the $1.2 trillion bill “renewable energy,” “high speed internet,” “school and child-care” upgrades for water (traditionally state and local), “climate change resilience,” “electric vehicle” money, and vaguely defined “reconnection communities.”

The $3.5 trillion piece is worse, spending on leftist priorities, federalizing local programs, and gutting constitutional prerogatives – education and college to zoning and economic policy.

The list includes forcing “universal pre-K ,” “universal tuition-free community college,” “maternal, behavioral and racial health equity,” “pandemic preparedness” (maybe to include for elections?), “affordable housing,” “rental assistance,” “zoning” “public housing,” “clean electricity,” “weatherizing and electrifying homes,” “climate research,” money to “prevent wildfires,” “seek lawful permanent status” for immigrants, “community violence intervention initiatives,” “healthy oceans,” “low-income solar and climate-friendly” programs, “climate equity,” “green materials,” “electrification of the federal fleet,” a “Native Civilian Climate Corp” for Indian Reservations, and the list goes on.

Net-net, what does false price, false limits on spending, false payment scheme, open-ended socialist content mean? The Democrats’ “Infrastructure bill” is a massive deception.

The Chamber of Commerce is hardly a far left group WB. You rely on partisan sources and as usual call any republicans that don’t tow the Trump talking points/and or lies at whatever particular moment rinos. Do you have anything that looks like you would put country over partisanship? Don’t worry, I gave up on you after Jan 6th.

your fat orange pos...

Btw Obamacare like infrastructure demonstrates the GOP’s ability to be against something until they actually have the power to get rid of it. Lots of votes to end Obamacare that stopped once they had the WH and Congress. Infrastructure was okay up till your fat orange pos wasn’t for it.

Any source you don’t like is a partisan source WB. The Chamber of Commerce isn’t the radical left but you dismissed that because CNN reported on it. Trump lying about the infrastructure bill of course is no problem for you. Your use of “rino” no longer applies to actual conservative principles but is based on loyalty to lying pos wannabe authoritarian.

I’ve listened to Trump’s calls to election officials in Georgia and his attempts to force his DOJ to lie about the election. (Just 2 off the top of my head) You are a fool if you think you look like someone that really hates authoritarian power grabs WB. The accusations you throw out in your long winded rants are the things Trump is usually blatantly guilty of. Fortunately I no longer bother to expect extremists like yourself to make sense or value democracy.