Today, Explained - Hot infrastructure summer

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

It’s a big week for President Biden’s infrastructure plans. Vox’s Li Zhou explains the obstacles in his way, and a historian says one of them is our collective memory. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I am standing dead center on the Hoover Dam, formerly known as the Boulder Dam, and it is 112 degrees Fahrenheit right now. I think that's about 45 degrees for my Celsius friends out there, and that is relevant because as we approach the Hoover Dam centenary, this crown jewel of American infrastructure is in bad shape. It's not the dam's fault per se, it's the water. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River creates a reservoir. It's called Lake Mead. When full, it's the largest reservoir in the United States. But I'm looking at it right now and you can see how far the water level has dropped. There's this high water mark, kind of like a giant bathtub ring ring and then there's where we are right

now well below it water levels at the Hoover Dam have never been lower since it opened in 1936 in its prime this sucker shaped the American Southwest Los Angeles wouldn't be the city it became without this dam but now it's all in jeopardy with record-breaking low water levels. This dam's producing a third less the hydroelectricity than it could be. It's one of the reasons California is at a high risk of power outages this summer. And things stand to get much worse. American infrastructure is old. And the changing climate is rendering a heck of a lot of it outmoded.

It's why the president and both parties are trying to spend a ton of money to bring the country into the 21st century. And it's why we here at Today Explained are dedicating a week of shows to talking about what needs to get done. That's right. It's Infrastructure Week. Infrastructure Week.

Infrastructure Week. Infrastructure Week. Week. Week. Week. It isn't just infrastructure week at Today Explained. It's actually infrastructure week in Washington, D.C. Biden's speaking about his very big plans today. Senator Schumer is supposed to call a vote on Wednesday to start a debate on a big infrastructure bill. But infrastructure week, those two words have a bit of a history in D.C. Infrastructure week.

It's all we've been talking about this week, right? Infrastructure. You know, fixing our old bridges, then jumping off them. We asked Li Zhou to explain she's leading the charge on infrastructure week for Vox. It started back during the Trump administration.

So we have to build roads. We have to build highways. We're talking about a very major infrastructure bill. Pretty much every other week, they would say they wanted to do something about infrastructure. My administration is working every day to deliver the world-class infrastructure. And it would never happen. So it became this running joke. Well, let's see how badly you want it.

Because if you want it badly, you're going to get it. And if you don't want it, that's OK with me, too. And it's really came back again during the Biden administration. Remember that bridge that went down? We got 10. Now it's not even just infrastructure week. It's hot infrastructure summer because of how long things have been taking and how this is expected to continue. Where we keep talking about progress on infrastructure, but at this point there's yet Biden announced an ambitious plan that promised to rebuild the country's economy and its infrastructure.

We covered it on the show. What happened to that plan? That plan actually got a ton of pushback from Republicans immediately. When I look at this, this is a staggering amount of spending, like someone with a new credit card. Typically, infrastructure is a very bipartisan idea. And so you would think that it would be one of the easier things to get everyone on board with. The issue is that there is a disagreement on what infrastructure is and how expansive that term should be. So you have Republicans who think that means what you would typically consider infrastructure.

Roads and bridges and ports and airports. And then you have Democrats who've really expanded that definition to include things like caregiving provisions, paid family leave. And so, like, there's a fundamental disagreement about what infrastructure is. And then on top of that, there's a disagreement about how to pay for it. And so those two in tandem have caused the conflict that we've seen so far. Well, take us back to March. The thing's introduced. It's huge.

It's sprawling. It covers things that people think are infrastructure and things that people disagree about. What happens next? After that, and you get the pushback from Republicans, you also have them proposing their own version of the bill. So Biden's original plan was over $2 trillion. Guess what? It grows the economy. Benefits everybody. Hurts nobody. Republicans come back to him with something that's roughly $600 billion. And we don't really see a lot of progress. And then this bipartisan gang forms.

And it's about 20 people, including 10 Republicans, 10 Democrats. And they try to put their heads together to come up with something that everyone can agree on and get behind. Tell me about the gang. Who's in the gang? The gang is a lot of the cast of characters that you would expect. They are moderate Democrats and Republicans who love bipartisanship and really believe that Congress can work together.

And so you have people like Joe Manchin. It's doable in a bipartisan way. Take that victory. And then on the Republican side, you have Rob Portman. Infrastructure has always been bipartisan. Susan Collins, Mitt Romney. So they are really focused

on trying to do something that can get both Democratic and Republican support. I know they didn't get this thing done. A vote to start the process is supposed to happen this week. but how far does the gang get? Well, technically, they do have some semblance of success. Today, President Biden walking out of the White House with senators from both parties to announce they've struck an agreement to rebuild the nation's critical infrastructure.

To answer your direct question, we have a deal. They get agreement on a framework and they get President Joe Biden's sign-off on it. And that's basically where they are right now. I clearly didn't get all I want. They signed off on a framework? That's not how a bill becomes a law. But how I hope and pray that I will

But today I am still just a bill. Right. If you look at actually what they put out, it is literally a table that has roads, bridges, transit, and the amount of money allocated to each is what the framework is. What? And what they're in the process of doing now is writing the actual bill. That sounds like a sixth grade homework assignment lee well what would you do with 1.2 trillion dollars i do think it's been funny to

see some of the press releases that have come out because some of them do look like they've been made on like microsoft paint um i will say this framework is a bit more sophisticated. You know, I'm going to say it probably looks like something out of Excel. Fancy. But the bill still hasn't been written yet. So that's what we're waiting on to see. But there is an agreement on $600 billion in new spending and the idea that it's going to be paid for not using changes to the corporate tax code, at least this piece of it, which is a big issue Republicans had. 600 billion sounds a lot less than 2 trillion. Yes. So are the Democrats just going to take like a huge haircut for the sake of bipartisanship and then pass a much smaller bill?

Is that what's going on here? Not exactly. So they have their own plan to also pass a Democratic infrastructure bill that is going to be much larger and that is going to include a lot of the stuff that did not make it into the bipartisan plan. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer lauded the Democrats' proposal, a $3.5 trillion budget outline calling for more spending toward health care, child care, education and climate. It would be paid for with taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans. This budget resolution will allow us to pass the most significant legislation to expand support and help American families since the New Deal. Since the New Deal. This is generational, transformational change. And they're doing what they are calling a two-track approach, where they will be taking

votes on both bills roughly around the same time and pursuing both of them in parallel so that the bipartisan stuff gets done and the Democratic stuff gets done as well. And what the second huge thing they're going to do through reconciliation, is that how they get it done? Yes, that's the plan. They can do it with just Democratic votes since it will only need 51 votes to pass. So they have the entire caucus and Kamala Harris voting on that. actual reconciliation bill itself won't be done until later in the year. It's possible that we see, you know, changes in momentum and internal divisions among Democrats potentially tripping up

that legislation. But they won't need Republican support if they can get all their members on board. So you've got these two sets of legislation, one bipartisan, one not. Together, they'd fulfill a lot of Biden's promises when it comes to building roads and bridges and to do what he calls, I guess, human infrastructure. What are the chances all of this goes according to plan? That is the biggest question right now. And there's certainly no sure thing on any of these for the bipartisan bill, still waiting to see just how many Republicans actually commit to it. And for the reconciliation bill, there are a lot of questions that are up in the air about what it will actually include. And it will have to go through the same process that we saw with the American Rescue Plan, where it needs to get approved by the parliamentarian, as well as actually get written by the committee before we

know for sure what will happen to it. So both of those run a risk of not actually coming to fruition. What did we learn along the way on this journey, Lee? It felt like Biden was really committed to getting sort of bipartisan buy-in. He did on a smaller thing, and then he's just turning around and doing his bigger thing through this sort of nifty budget reconciliation tool that obviously the other side of the aisle won't like anyway. Is this truly bipartisan government in spirit? Did it matter at all to even try and get Republicans on board? Should they just have gone it alone the entire time? It does feel like a really circuitous way to go about this. And a large reason they did it this way is both because Joe Biden himself

believes so much in bipartisanship, but also because you had several moderate Democrats, including Joe Manchin, who said they did not want to go forward on a Democratic-only bill until they considered a moderate one. And so you actually just have a lot of these Democrats who are pushing for bipartisanship because that's what they believe in. And then you have some of them like Mark Kelly and Maggie Hassan who will be up for re-election in the next cycle. And so for them, it's a way to probably appeal to moderates and independents in their state

who might be happy to see that they did something with Republicans. Biden bet big on bipartisanship and that might work out. No guarantees. What's clear is that big, ambitious spending on ourselves isn't as popular an idea as it was, say, after the Great Depression. Biden's new New Deal versus the old one? In a minute on Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family.

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And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com

to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. President Biden and the Democrats say they're trying to recreate an infrastructure plan from almost 100 years ago. That was when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal transformed every part of the United States. Especially the rural parts of the country because of the roads that they created, the farm-to-market roads, the schools that they built, modern schools, the electrification.

Gray Brecken, he's a scholar at the Living New Deal Project at UC Berkeley in California, which has tried to catalog New Deal projects whose origins have been lost to history. So it's most of our airports, it's our zoos, it's the Triborough Bridge in New York, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. It's military bases because it's segged right into the war. It's wildlife refuges. It's the Red Rock Amphitheater outside of Denver. The Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood. It's those beautiful murals that you see

in all of our post offices, a thousand of which were built under the New Deal. It's entire universities like Brooklyn College. If the federal government, your government, had not done at least some of these things, the state governments would probably not have done them at all out of their own resources. It's the roads we drive over and don't know it. It's electrification. It's the Tennessee Valley Authority, Bonneville Dam, Grand Coulee Dam.

It's hydroelectric energy, which we get, and the water that we get, which have enabled sun-belt cities like Phoenix to arise and grow up. Right. It contributed enormously to our public health because at the beginning of the New Deal, a minority of Americans had safe drinking water. And once they had built the sewers and the water distribution systems and the sewage treatment plants, we all had safe drinking water and we had public hospitals as well, too. It's the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, the Alamo,

things we take for granted when we go and visit them. Add it all up. When next you'll wonder why the national government hasn't balanced its budget over the last six years. It's an immense legacy that we take for granted and we don't know where it came from because most of it's unmarked. And so we're sort of recovering it from the collective amnesia that we ever did such a thing. Why did we forget? How did we forget? I mean, we built America and then forgot about it? Well, Roosevelt, in initiating the New Deal, earned some very powerful enemies. That is the wealthy. They called him a traitor to his class because he was wealthy himself. And so they didn't appreciate the fact that in order to pay for the New Deal, he instituted progressive taxation, estate taxes. He essentially was a

friend of labor unions and the working man, which made him enormously popular with working class people. But very powerful people such as William Randolph Hearst really hated him for that because those taxes, those progressive taxes put a real crimp in such things as his collecting and his building his castles. My friends, this whole system of income taxation has degenerated into a racket. Hearst, of course, was an extremely powerful person at that time.

Like Rupert Murdoch today, he was a thought shaper for millions of people. And he called Roosevelt more communist than the communists themselves. Help us remember how the New Deal was implemented. Was Roosevelt talking about just creating jobs or was he talking about infrastructure? Was he pitching it the same way Biden is pitching his infrastructure spending? Roosevelt had to address an immediate catastrophe.

That is the Great Depression. He came in after four years of ever-deepening economic crisis. And so what he did was he told the American people that we were engaged in something akin to war, except that this was a war against the Depression. So as in a war, all the stops were off as far as spending goes. It's an existential crisis, and the Depression was an existential crisis. He said, if it doesn't work, the New Deal doesn't work, I will be the last president, because he knew that the country was right on the verge of a revolution or another civil war, And he knew that one civil war was one too many.

So what he did was pump huge amounts of money into the economy to put people back to work and to give them the self-esteem that they had lost. How does that compare to the position Biden's in right now because of the coronavirus pandemic? Well, Biden actually is facing several existential crises at the same time. One is the pandemic that we have that we are not bringing under control as we should. And of course, the other is the climate crisis that we're confronting. But in fact, actually, Biden is in a different kind of Great Depression. That is that millions of Americans are experiencing a Great Depression individually. That is the enormous numbers of people

that we see homeless on our streets. They are experiencing the Great Depression very personally. One of the things that was very interesting about the New Deal or the New Dealers is that they thought seriously about how government could be used to create a healthier society. And so what they did was they instituted not only physical public works, but what they called service projects such as home care, free education, food distribution and clothing distribution to the needy, they in fact actually did create a much healthier society by thinking consciously about that. We don't, and so we're creating exactly the opposite today. structure bill through Congress, we are not looking at this kind of spending the way Washington was in the time of the New Deal. Well, Roosevelt came into office with a very different situation

because his predecessor, Hoover, a Republican who hated Roosevelt, had not been able to do anything about the Depression except watch as it got worse. So Roosevelt had an enormous popularity. And so what he had was a solidly Democratic Congress, which pretty much rubber stamped anything that he or his brain trust wanted. So Biden is in a very tough and very different situation. The Democrats have the slimmest of majorities, and it's not solidly Democratic in the way that Roosevelt had. The Great Depression was an unspeakable calamity at the time, from which many people like my parents suffered their entire lives from a kind of PTSD. We are actually in a similar crisis or crises today. And I think that's one of the reasons that Biden so often looks back to Roosevelt and has a large picture of Roosevelt, because he knows he's confronting crises similar to those that confronted Roosevelt when he came into office. Gray Brecken, he's a scholar at the Living New Deal Project at UC Berkeley. Thank you. New Deal projects all across the country. This is episode one of a five-episode series we're doing this week. We're not through with it. We're just previewing it. This ain't the whole show.

We're just EQing it. We're going to talk about trains, toilets, child care, and why it's so dang expensive to build stuff in the United States. So stay tuned. It is infrastructure week on Today Explained.ご視聴ありがとうございました