Today, Explained - Infrastructure Pete

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explains what he and his boss are calling a once-in-a-generation spending plan. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a finan...cial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Infrastructure, Infrastructure Week. It's Infrastructure Week on Today Explained. You might have heard. We started the week talking about the current administration's plans
Starting point is 00:00:28 and our forgetfulness when it comes to all that New Deal infrastructure we built a century or so ago. Then we talked about trains and why it's so dang expensive to build things in America. Then we flushed ourselves down a toilet to explore what's wrong with our wastewater systems. Yesterday, we talked about human infrastructure. And today, we talked about human infrastructure, and today we're going to talk to an infrastructure human, President Biden's Secretary of Transportation, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who, when we spoke, didn't seem that sour that he didn't get to be president.
Starting point is 00:01:01 I mean, you know, you get to be the secretary of planes, trains, and automobiles, but also a lot of things people don't think about as much, from maritime to things like commercial space travel, which had a big week and which we oversee in some respects. But the biggest thing is that so many of the most important issues of our time are at stake in transportation. Transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. So if you care about climate change, this is one of the biggest places you could do something about it. Transportation turns out to play a huge role in racial equity and economic justice in this country. And again, there's a chance to do a lot about that. It's central in the economy. It's where a lot of the most interesting things that are going to shape our future are playing out, especially in this decade, in the 2020s. And, you know, any day would
Starting point is 00:01:47 be an exciting place to be. But at this moment, where it's also in the center of the domestic policy conversation in a way that, you know, transportation nerds don't get to see that, that, you know, we don't get to see that kind of moment in the sunshine any old year. And of course, the president himself really cares about transportation. Does that make you his favorite cabinet member? Do you know? Has he said it? I don't know about that, but it's definitely great to be working on something that the president cares about. I mean, you take something like passenger rail, right? And I think in any other administration, I would be confident of being the biggest passenger rail enthusiast on the team. But it's always going to be second place to the president in this group,
Starting point is 00:02:28 although I'm making it a close second. I'm 36 years old. I believe you're 39 years old. The president is 78 years old. The Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, not far from where we are in Washington, D.C., is 148 years old. What is the plan for updating our aging and outdated infrastructure, Secretary? Look, we are coasting off of infrastructure investments and infrastructure decisions that were made one, two, five generations ago. And we've gotten away with it up to a certain point,
Starting point is 00:03:01 disinvesting in this country's public resources for the last 40 years or so. But it's caught up to us. And you see it in crumbling roads, bridges that have to be taken offline, or worse, that actually collapse. So many areas that are a single point of failure, where if something goes wrong, an entire part of the economy could be jammed up. So we know that we have to do something and do something quickly. And that's what the bipartisan infrastructure framework is. This is the biggest investment that we've made in public transit, for example, ever as a country. Biggest investment in passenger rail since they set up Amtrak in the first place. And you go on and on down the list,
Starting point is 00:03:40 and partly in terms of taking care of what we have, like the example you raised, right? These tunnels that are, they were great. I mean, total state of the art 100 years ago. But, you know, the times have changed. But also areas that nobody was thinking about when they dug these tunnels, like, you know, those tunnels probably ought to carry fiber optic cable while we're at it. And it's part of the vision to get every single American affordable, fast internet. The fact that it turns out lead pipes are not okay. And there's no acceptable level of lead exposure for children, which is why we need to get 100% of those lead service lines taken care of. All of that's part of this package. And I don't think you have to be part of one political party or a political supporter of the president to see the urgency of getting that done,
Starting point is 00:04:25 which is why it feels as we're moving this infrastructure vision through, it feels like one of the few areas left of actual bipartisan compromise or bipartisan agreement in domestic policy, which I'm hopeful if this goes well, we can build on in some other areas too. Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit about the politics here. We kicked off the week talking about the politics, talking about how there's these two plans. There's this bipartisan plan, and then there's this sort of budget reconciliation plan where the Democrats seemingly will have to go it alone. Why are there two plans? And can you explain what's in each of them? I think some people out there might find a little confusing. Yeah, here's the way I think of it. All think some people out there might find a little confusing.
Starting point is 00:05:06 Yeah, here's the way I think of it. All of this added together is the president's economic vision. It's how we not only respond to the moment, but make sure that Americans can thrive. And there are tons of pieces that go into that. It's roads and bridges. It's child care. It's making sure that our housing is improving, taking care of our health care infrastructure. Now, we had a certain way of breaking that down.
Starting point is 00:05:30 The president had a jobs plan and a families plan. Admittedly, even that could overlap as you think about it. These issues touch each other, but we broke it down a certain way. And that's evolved through time in these conversations with Congress. So now we have two chunks, right? One, the bipartisan infrastructure framework. These are mostly transportation infrastructure investments. Again, this is huge. This is $1.2 trillion over the coming years. And it's not just kind of renewing or reauthorizing what we always do. This is a generational investment. And these are things that we think a lot of Republicans can and should support, too. Then you have the second part. We like to think of it as infrastructure, too. We call it human infrastructure, but it's not worth getting bogged down in a definitional debate. The point is this is a set of really good policies that we need as
Starting point is 00:06:14 a country, like making sure everyone can get paid family leave, something people in pretty much every other country take for granted, making sure that it is affordable to have child care, getting everybody, three- and four-year-olds, pre-kindergarten education and getting everybody access to community college. These things, by the way, I don't see why Republicans couldn't vote for this, but it sounds like most of them won't. Did you go into it knowing that they wouldn't? Did you break these into two separate buckets because you knew there wouldn't be bipartisan buy-in on this sort of human infrastructure spending? Yeah, the president's view is if there's something we can do together, if there's something that we
Starting point is 00:06:50 could do on a bipartisan basis, then we should try. But there are also parts of his agenda that may not move that way. And you don't give up on those parts of the vision. You try to get them through, even if that means having to go it alone, like we did on the rescue plan that the American people overwhelmingly wanted to happen. But you just couldn't get Republicans on Capitol Hill to vote for us. The president said, look, we need to do this. And we did it. So anyway, to get back to your original question, the way I would think of it is the part of the president's vision that we can do together with the other side of the aisle, we're going to do together. That's the bipartisan infrastructure framework. And the rest of it, we may have to do alone,
Starting point is 00:07:27 but it's still worth doing. On the bipartisan bill, it seems like there's a lot of pushback about how it will be paid for. How are you meeting the arguments that the plan is unaffordable or that there's no solid plan to pay for it. So before we get into the details of the plan, let's just say, let's just point out that it doesn't make sense that the richest country in the world can't afford decent infrastructure. Right? We're not even talking about, you know, space cars or hoverboards for everybody. We're talking about stuff that people in a lot of other countries already have. We're talking about bringing our standard of passenger rail nearer to what they enjoy today in Morocco or Italy. If the richest country in the world can't have this, then what are we even talking about? So,
Starting point is 00:08:18 of course, we can afford it. The question is how. The question is how do you actually raise the revenue to do it? Now, the president has been very flexible on this. He had one red line, and that was he made a promise that he's not going to raise taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year because he thinks the majority of American families are in that category are already paying more than enough. We also see some of the biggest corporations in this country making billions of dollars in profits, many of which paid zero, zero in taxes. We see some of the wealthiest Americans who, as a percentage rate, pay a lower income tax rate, in effect, than a school teacher or a firefighter. It doesn't make sense. Americans agree. By the way, a lot of Republicans across America get that that doesn't make sense. And so the president put forward a way to pay for all this that is
Starting point is 00:09:05 basically about asking corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share. We've gone round and round on a lot of different ways to do it. And that's part of what's playing out even as we speak in the back and forth with the House and the Senate. And that's a natural, sometimes messy part of the legislative process. But the bottom line is, of course we can afford this as a country and maybe even more importantly, we can't afford not to. I mean, we're paying that you can estimate to the tune of hundreds of dollars per family in a lot of places, a sort of invisible, we call it a pothole tax, an invisible cost that people are paying already right now, just from their cars getting beat up and the roads being in bad shape. We are paying a price right now in terms of goods and services being backed up
Starting point is 00:09:48 from overburdened infrastructure. And that's only going to get worse, to say nothing of the climate-related costs of business as usual. So we're going to pay one way or the other. We will pay less if we do it smart and if we do it now. More with Secretary Buttigieg in a minute on Today Explained. Thank you. designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.
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Starting point is 00:12:22 Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Secretary Buttigieg, infrastructure is clearly a top priority in the Biden administration. Even the former president talked about it quite a bit. All the same, how can you ensure that your vision, which isn't a vision for the next three or four years, but is a vision for the next generation, has staying power in future administrations? Well, this is one of the reasons why we're paying a lot of attention to policy, not just the big dollar amounts that are getting thrown around,
Starting point is 00:13:10 but what do we do to encourage, for example, states before they widen a highway to check whether that's going to help or whether you're just going to get that many more cars on the road? And is there an alternative that's actually going to be more efficient? Policies that encourage equity and paying attention in a country that has a really disturbing legacy, for example, of routing highways through black neighborhoods and tearing them apart, that this time around the policies encourage those dollars to be spent in ways that unite and knit people together instead of dividing them. These are things that, as we put them into place, they can help shape how future dollars are spent, no matter who's signing the checks in future administrations. And it's also an obligation to get this right,
Starting point is 00:13:55 because again, going to the example of highways and what that meant for racial justice, you know, when you put up a piece of physical infrastructure, you know, unlike a lot of other policies that could be theoretically changed overnight, it's there. It's there for a very long time. And so you better get it right the first time. The president's also injecting a lot of climate policy into this massive spending plan. How is that being received? The first thing we've got to recognize is that every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge that or not. You know, transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, acknowledge that or not. You know, transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, as I said earlier. To me, that means we get to be the
Starting point is 00:14:29 biggest part of the solution, but only if we're actually doing policy in the right way. So before we even get to what you would call a climate title in a bill, just the way we make it easier or harder to have transit in a community, the way we support the rollout of electric vehicles and the president's vision for half a million electric vehicle charging stations around the country. All of these things are climate policy, which is why so much is at stake in this transportation side of the bill. Then you have other things that we need to do around incentives and tax policy and energy standards that are being contemplated in the other bill that may have to be passed without Republican votes. Look, time's up. I mean, this is no longer a theoretical thing.
Starting point is 00:15:11 The recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest basically shouldn't even be possible were it not for climate change. You saw a transit system shut down because their cables were beginning to melt. We saw parts of highway buckling in the heat. And different parts of the country had different examples of how this climate challenge is upon us. So we need to do two things. We need to curb the emissions, match the president's ambitious goals
Starting point is 00:15:38 that he laid out at the climate summit, and stop climate change from getting any worse. And we got to deal with the fact that it's here, which means a resilient infrastructure. If a road's getting washed out every third year now, maybe we shouldn't build it right where it was. Maybe there's a different way to do it. And so on the resilience side and the climate prevention side,
Starting point is 00:15:55 you just can't separate that from what we're doing on so-called hard infrastructure. It feels like we're going from administration to administration in these wild jump cuts where you had Obama pushing forward a lot of climate policy, his successor basically gutting the EPA, and now you guys are coming in and trying to do a ton of stuff. I mean, how does Washington adjust to these dramatic shifts? Well, that's why our work is not only to win the day in any given congressional vote, but to make sure that we're having a conversation with the American people about how we got here, about what it means to them when we get these policies
Starting point is 00:16:37 through. And when you do that, that's when you have staying power. And the example I would always give is the Affordable Care Act, right? This was a largely unpopular policy by the time the Obama administration pushed it through. But it made such a positive difference for so many people that eventually, even when Republicans had all the levers of government, House, Senate, White House, they couldn't destroy it. They wouldn't destroy it because the American people knew that it was a good policy and that we needed to keep it. They wouldn't destroy it because the American people knew that it was a good policy and that we needed to keep it. I think that gives us a playbook for a lot of things, where if we get the policy right and Americans understand why their lives are better because we did it right, then first of all, hopefully, you know, you get some acknowledgement for that, some credit, and you get returned to
Starting point is 00:17:23 office and you get to keep serving. But even if you don't, even your opponents cannot dismantle good policies so easily. You know, we've been talking about infrastructure all week on the show, and a lot of the feedback we've been getting has been a little cynical, a little hopeless. People feel like this country has fallen so far behind and there is such political division on some of these essential issues that we're never going to catch up. You are not a jilted Washingtonian coming into this and seeing what potential there is with fresh eyes. What would you say to those people who have little to no hope? I think we're at an extraordinary moment. I mean, first of all, again, investments that have been talked about for years, decades even, are actually about to happen. And technological change is upon us in ways that are incredibly exciting, scary,
Starting point is 00:18:21 dangerous even, if we don't get it right. But if we do get it right, the impact of electric vehicles, the impact of automated vehicles, the impact of drones, again, could cut either way. We've got to get it right. But what that could mean for congestion, for climate, for rural and tribal communities is extraordinary. So I think the 2020s will go down as one of the most transformative decades we've ever had in transportation. And it means we get to leapfrog some of our own old, maybe overburdened systems if we make the right investments and if we're smart about these policy choices. I wouldn't be doing this if I weren't full of optimism about what's possible. Not that it's easy. Let me mention one other thing, which is a lot of other competing, you know, some of our friendly competitors. You look at a lot of European countries that seem to
Starting point is 00:19:07 be and are light years ahead of us on things from high-speed rail to, you know, bicycle commuting. But if you look at their not-so-recent past, they weren't always that way. There's not something in, you know, Scandinavian DNA that makes them more likely to bicycle or build, you know, high-speed rail or have fewer pedestrian deaths. They made policy choices. And those policy choices are in front of us, too. Secretary Buttigieg, thank you so much for your time. Same here. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:19:41 Infrastructure Week on Today Explained was brought to you by Amina Alsadi, Matthew Collette, Afim Shapiro, Halima Shah, Thank you. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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