OPINION:
President Biden is reportedly planning on legislative projects on the scale of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
He and I are both old enough to remember that era, but we have drawn different conclusions. The Great Society was a colossal failure, and the president’s infrastructure bill represents some of the worst aspects of its flaws.
First, a little context for those who did not live through the 1960s. When he succeeded the assassinated John F. Kennedy, President Johnson initiated a series of legislative programs designed to transform America. Johnson wanted to eliminate poverty and want. He ultimately made the situation worse. The Great Society should be a cautionary tale for Mr. Biden; it should not be an example.
Like Mr. Biden, with the stimulus legislation and immunization — which was going to happen anyway — Johnson had some early triumphs. In the area of civil rights, he pushed through long-overdue legislation and he also got Medicare and Medicaid which survive to this day, but later Great Society programs created debacle after debacle. They suffered from three major problems. First, they were too big and unfocussed. Second, they failed to put enough emphasis on the actual problems they were trying to solve. Third, they led to greater and greater budget deficits.
Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill is a poster child for Great Society incompetence. Only 5% of the funds in the bill focus on the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges. Some other money is earmarked for care for the aging. Since Mr. Biden and I represent a considerable part of the geezer population which still is a considerable voting bloc, that is probably good politics.
There is also money for high-speed Internet. The rest is new-age climate change pap, which will do nothing to solve the physical infrastructure problem that should be the focus of the legislation. He has also thrown in child poverty, which has nothing to do with infrastructure. This harkens back to Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).
OEO was designed to create jobs for America’s — largely Black — urban unemployed; it did everything but. Ivy League-educated progressive bureaucrats, most of whom had never held a real job, designed job training programs for jobs that did not exist and insisted that those training programs include courses on how to organize protests. These newly educated protest experts later hounded Johnson out of office.
By putting road and bridge infrastructure at the bottom of the priority list in a bill that it is supposed to highlight, Mr. Biden is going back to the future. The president wants to spend billions — which will likely become trillions — on electric car charging stations. Very few citizens are excited by electric cars, so more billions will need to be spent in giving the public no alternative to buying the electronic lemons.
This misbegotten type of social engineering harkens back to Great Society welfare programs, which forced Black fathers to stay away from their families in fear of losing benefits.
This brings us to the question of financing, another Great Society wannabe. Mr. Biden intends to pay for the whole thing in 15 years by raising the corporate tax rate to 28%. He is smart enough to know that raising it to the Obama-era 31% would be a business disincentive. However, even The Washington Post realizes that the payment plan is unrealistic. Like Great Society programs, the current price tag of more than $2 trillion is sleight of hand.
Most thinking Americans on both sides of the political spectrum believe that we need to address crumbling infrastructure. Republicans and moderate Democrats can do the country — and Mr. Biden — a favor by focusing the legislation and trimming it down.
The first task is to get rid of the Green New Deal nonsense and focus on real infrastructure; they can live in old folk’s homes and long-term care, but getting rid of the proposal’s excess fat would make the price tag actually affordable and realistic.
Second, Congress could insist that the projects be made to help fund themselves by insisting on tolls for new construction. Unlike a gas tax which would hurt the middle class, tolls are discretionary. People who do not want to pay them can take the long way around.
By forcing the administration to limit the cost of the program to addressing the infrastructure issue, Republicans and moderate Democrats could do something that is rare in recent American history. It could produce legislation that fixes the problem that it was designed to solve.
• Gary Anderson lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
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