Today, Explained - Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

It’s infrastructure week in America. President Joe Biden unveiled a plan to spend trillions on bridges, roads, housing, and clean energy to prove it. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. So today, I'm proposing a plan for the nation that rewards work, not just rewards wealth. It builds a fair economy that gives everybody a chance to succeed. And it's going to create the strongest, most resilient, innovative economy in the world. Ellen Nielsen, you report on the Biden administration for Vox. President Joe Biden today unveiled a very big plan, a historically big plan. What's the name of the game here? What's he trying to do? Yeah, so Biden today unveiled the American Jobs Plan, which is a $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan for moving the country towards clean energy, creating millions of jobs, and doing a number of things related to the nation's infrastructure.

It's about infrastructure. The American Jobs Plan will modernize 20,000 miles of highways, roads and main streets that are in difficult, difficult shape right now. It'll fix the nation's 10 most economically significant bridges in America that require replacement. But there's also a lot in there that you wouldn't necessarily think of when the word infrastructure is thrown around. It's a once-in-a-generation investment in America, unlike anything we've seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago. In fact, it's the largest American jobs investment since World War II. I mean, there's a lot for manufacturing. There's a lot for building and retrofitting

housing units and homes and basically trying to do a big push of affordable housing in the country. But then there's also $400 billion towards long-term care in the U.S. and basically, you know, trying to get people who are home health aides better pay and better benefits and really sort of trying to revitalize this care infrastructure in the country as well. Well, let's break it down. I mean, what's the price tag here and how much money is going where? What I'm proposing is a one-time capital investment of roughly $2 trillion in America's future, spread largely over eight years. It will generate historic job growth, historic economic growth, help businesses to compete internationally, create more revenue as well. Yeah, so the total price tag of the American Jobs Plan is $2 trillion over the next eight years.

And it's worth noting right at the top that this is one of two plans. There is going to be another plan that Biden is supposed to introduce in the coming weeks that we're expecting to focus a little bit more on child care and health care. So the overall price tag of this, expect that to rise.

But of this American Jobs Plan, $2 trillion plan, the bulk of the plan is $621 billion in infrastructure spending. So this is the roads, bridges, rail systems, ports spending. And then there's $300 billion to bolster American manufacturing. There's $213 billion dedicated to affordable housing, $400 billion for home and community-based health and elder care. And then altogether, a collective around $380 billion for research and development,

modernizing the electricity grid, and installing high-speed broadband around the country. I could go for some high-speed broadband. Yeah, a lot of people could. My parents up in northern New Hampshire do not have high-speed broadband, and they would like it very much. This is their moment, Ella. You don't have to include that part. No, we're going to include it. Shout out to Ella's parents. Now we're definitely going to include it.

President Biden, of course, is not the first president in recent memory to talk a big game on infrastructure. This has happened in recent memory. We're here today to discuss the urgent need to rebuild and restore America's depleted infrastructure. It is also time to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Our infrastructure will again be the best in the world. We used to have the greatest infrastructure. Well, we're going toumbling infrastructure. Our infrastructure will again be the best in the world. We used to have the greatest infrastructure. Well, we're going to get infrastructure. Infrastructure is the easiest of all.

How does this compare to all of the prior infrastructure plans and intentions? Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know if you can call, at least in the last administration, if you can call them actually infrastructure plans. There were a lot of infrastructure intentions, but they never really went. So many infrastructure tweets, maybe? So many tweets about this is infrastructure week. So yeah, so, you know, Trump in his presidency was always promising infrastructure. And that was always kind of seen as, you know, Trump, when Trump was elected, he was this divisive Republican president. But infrastructure was kind of always in the ether as something that plausibly like congressional Democrats and Trump could could work on. It was sort of like if there is a thing that Democrats

and Republicans in the Trump era could work on, it would be infrastructure. But of course, you know, there was I remember covering this pretty explosive meeting, one of many explosive meetings between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump and then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at the White House where they went in to talk infrastructure. We've had more than one infrastructure week now under the Trump administration, but this week must go down as the shortest one ever. When President Trump stormed out of a White House meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer without letting either of them even get to the subject of infrastructure. Then I walked into the room and I told Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it. I'd be really good at that. That's what I do. But you know what? You can't do it more than you want to do it. I'd be really good at that. That's what I do.

But you know what? You can't do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with. And that was our life for two years. So the former president never fully realized his infrastructure tweets, but was Congress doing anything on its own? Yeah, absolutely. Last year, House Democrats passed a $1.5 trillion plan for infrastructure, basically kind of their bid for what they wanted a big infrastructure bill to look like. And this year marks their deadline for a five-year reauthorization bill on surface

transportation, which is like highways and roads and bridges. So they have the House and Senate committees have a September deadline to get this five year reauthorization done. And it is possible that that can be a bipartisan bill that Democrats and Republicans work on together. And I did see some reporting this morning that what Biden is proposing in his bill for infrastructure, the $620 billion is on top of the surface transportation bill that's already in Congress, which there's no final number on that, but House Democrats have proposed like $500 billion. So if you add those

two together, there could be $1 trillion passed for infrastructure, all told. So it sounds like what you're saying is that, you know, there have been prior infrastructure plans circulating around Congress, but this thing is just a lot bigger. It's a lot bigger. And it's also just kind of the it's the administration's kind of stamp on it. And it's definitely, you know, it's going to be overshadowing a lot of the conversations, especially because there's also a pretty big tax plan that was introduced along with the American Jobs Plan to finance it, which would raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent and close a lot of loopholes that allow corporations to stash their money in offshore banks. In 2019, an independent analysis found that there are 91, let me say it

again, 91 Fortune 500 companies, biggest companies in the world, including Amazon, that use various loopholes where they pay not a single solitary penny in federal income tax. I don't want to punish them. That's just wrong. That's just wrong. And, you know, as you might suspect, Republicans aren't a huge fan of raising taxes. So the pay-fors in this tax portion could really kind of be the thing that's contentious between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that.

What's the plan for getting this thing passed? It's huge. We're probably going to be looking at this dragging out through the summer. There are going to be a lot of lawmakers that want to kind of get their pet projects into the next budget reconciliation bill, if that's how Democrats choose to pass this infrastructure bill. So there's just going to be a lot of jockeying from different members to get their priorities addressed. And I think that people are kind of estimating that we'll probably be wrapped up

kind of in early fall, potentially. Hmm. So this is going to be sitting with us for a while, but you mentioned that there are going to be a lot of lawmakers trying to sneak in their pet projects. Does that mean that this will have bipartisan support because both sides will be wanting to sneak in some pet projects? It potentially could. And the other thing that I should note here is that Congress is bringing back earmarks. So pork is back, baby.

Hey! Hey, what's going on down there? The past two presidents have used their initial mandates to do big, ambitious things to health care, to the tax code. And it looks like this will be Biden's big thing, huh? Infrastructure? I mean, there is, you know, for a long time there has sort of been this this critical need. I mean, in the fact sheet that the administration put out last night, they noted that the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, yet ranks 13th when it comes to the overall quality of infrastructure. It's just been a long time since Congress has passed, you know, a comprehensive infrastructure bill. And there are a lot of communities where roads and bridges are, you know, just kind of falling apart. But it's more than that, too.

And I think that with, you know, the expanding this conventional definition of infrastructure, I think the Biden administration, in addition to looking at this as an infrastructure bill, they also see this as a climate bill and see this as their best shot to, you know, really lower America's emissions by investing in clean energy. They see this as a caregiving bill. So it's kind of like, I feel like sort of this, you know, beyond infrastructure as a word, it's sort of this like philosophical stamp kind of that Biden is making on where he wants the country to go and how he sees this very large, all-encompassing infrastructure and jobs plan as a way to get there.

We have to move now because I'm convinced that if we act now, in 50 years, people are going to look back and say, this was the moment that America won the future. You can read Ella's reporting on Biden's infrastructure plan at Vox.com. The plan represents a rethinking of what infrastructure spending can be. In a minute, you'll hear from a guy who kind of wishes it didn't. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferm. It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family,

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It means under the structure. What supports the structure is the infrastructure. You know, the structure of the society in our case, you know, is commerce. You look at some of the earliest definitions of civil engineering and engineering generally is in service to society, in service to commerce. It was important to make it easy for your country to do business with other countries. That meant you needed good harbors, you needed good roads, you needed a good distribution system. Professor Henry Petrosky thinks a lot about infrastructure. He's worked on infrastructure as a civil engineer. He's taught courses about it at Duke University, and he's published a number of books on the subject.

The book is called The Road Taken. It's an allusion to Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. And it's published by an embarrassing... It was published by Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury Press. I asked Professor Petroski what exactly is wrong with American infrastructure, why the word infrastructure is so often preceded with the word crumbling in America. Well, it's embarrassing on a certain level compared to what else exists around the

world in developed countries. We've talked about the Japanese bullet train. We've talked about German Autobahn. I drive up and down the East Coast a fair number of times and go through some pretty rough periods there of potholes and just general congestion. Generally speaking, my anecdotal experience is other countries have better infrastructure than we do as a whole, and they maintain it much better. I was driving in Germany not long ago, and that was my impression there. It was not that there weren't any people filling potholes. There weren't potholes. And the reason there weren't, I believe, is that, you know, they's high-speed rail network, it feels like upgrading isn't enough to even catch up, to even be in the same league as some of our peer nations.

That's right. I believe we're way behind in high-speed rail. I've ridden in Japan on that train, and there's nothing to compare it to in this country. I have written also on the acelo between Boston and Washington, D.C., and that's embarrassingly slow and rough and ugly. Joe Biden's favorite train. Yeah, well, he should know what it needs then. Why do you think it is we've fallen so far behind? What's to blame? I mean, not an expert, but it looks like it could be this convoluted mess of, you know, federal funding mixed with local funding across 50 different states with 50 different ideas for infrastructure spending that could be impeding progress here.

I think that's part of it. I think part of it has been reactive rather than proactive with infrastructure. You know, there are people in government who want to get perks for their district, for example, so they want to build a tunnel in California or a bridge to Canada. And that's a big chunk of money. But if they get it, other people are going to want the equivalent. And, you know, it just snowballs. And it's got to do with raw political power

in a way about whether it happens or not. You're talking about all the pork and earmarks Ella told us about in the first half of the show that we're sure to see here. Therein lies the problem. It's not a clean bill about infrastructure unless you interpret infrastructure so broadly that it includes everything.

Since the institution of the interstate highway system back in the 50s, there's been what is called the Highway Trust Fund. And the federal government controls that. And it's an original intention. And for a long time, it ran that when you go and buy gasoline at the pump, you pay a certain tax, let's say, they could apply to the federal government, to the Highway Trust Fund, to have either all or a portion of it paid through that fund. So although the federal government didn't control things directly, it had, I would say, a control over the purse, and it could express a preference for this or that. That sounds bad on

the one hand, but there are benefits to it too, and that is that the federal government can enforce uniformity so that when you go from state to state, suddenly you don't hit a whole new system of signs. You recognize them immediately as a driver. For almost at least a decade, I believe, the Highway Trust Fund has been running in the red, and the federal government has had to supplement it from the general fund, I think they call it. The states have been left holding the bag in the sense that there's less federal money coming to them. They also have the authority to charge tax at the pump, and they have been, and they've been looking for alternatives. So we're at a standoff in a way. I'd say we can't go on much longer, but we've been going on for decades this way. This gasoline tax, it's per

gallon. I think it's 17 and a half cents or something like that, maybe 18 since the mid-90s. There's been no increase for inflation in electric cars that the federal government has been encouraging. They don't pay any tax at the gas pump because they don't use gasoline. So it's a problem that has many, many tentacles, and it'll take some pretty sharp thinking to figure it out. And also it'll take some cooperation among politicians. If someone was from the federal government were listening to this, and they wanted your advice and your opinion on how to take infrastructure seriously, what's the big idea you have for them?

It's got to be a holistic approach. You've got to look at, it's not just a touchy-feely issue about whether we have potholes or not. It's an economic issue. What does our infrastructure and the condition it's in do to the overall economy,

to the gross national product and so forth? We're talking about many, many hours per year that people who commute to work lose in productive time because they're stuck in traffic jams or bad roads. Potholes mean that they have to spend money repairing their car more than they would had the roads been smooth. So we've got to look at more than just the narrow problem of roads and bridges and everything else. Henry Petrosky. He is the Alexander S. Vesic Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duke University. He dreams of a day when the United States takes infrastructure spending seriously. And he's got a high bar

because today the president proposed a historic $2 trillion plan. And Petrosky was like, yeah, but that's $2 trillion over eight years. And it's got all this other stuff attached to it. Not impressed. It's Today Explained. Thank you.