Sometimes an infrastructure bill isn’t an infrastructure bill.
Such is the case with Biden’s $2+ trillion infrastructure bill, that some progressives are already complaining should be $10 trillion (or nearly half the size of the U.S. economy).
Only six percent of the proposed spending goes towards roads and bridges in its current form, and overall, less than half of the “infrastructure spending” actually goes towards things traditionally defined as infrastructure.
According to Fox News:
President Biden’s $2 trillion spending plan, which is being promoted largely as a bill to address infrastructure, directs well under half of its total money to things traditionally defined as infrastructure, according to a Fox News analysis.
The analysis, based on the 25-page summary of the president’s proposal for the “American Jobs Plan,” indicates less than $750 billion of the spending fits even a broad definition of infrastructure.
The White House is casting a very wide net about what constitutes infrastructure — for example, the American Jobs Plan references “care infrastructure” when talking about $25 billion to upgrade child care facilities and a $400 billion expenditure on care for the elderly and disabled. That’s quite different from repairing potholes and rebuilding bridges.
Among the non-infrastructure spending includes:
- The aforementioned $400 billion for home-based care for elderly and disabled
- $35 billion for climate change-related R&D
- $50 billion for “research infrastructure” at the National Science Foundation
- $50 billion for new Commerce Department office “dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity”
- $213 billion for home sustainability and public housing
- A $174 billion “investment” in electric vehicles
- $213 billion directed as “home sustainability and public housing”
And more!
Jen “Circle Back” Psaki was questioned about the bill this week, with Peter Doocy asking “Only five percent of the spending in this package goes towards roads and bridges, and I’m curious why that number is so low in something being sold as an infrastructure package.”
Psaki responded by not addressing the details of the question: “Uhh, we’re actually selling it as a once-in-a-century or once-in-a-generation investment in partly our infrastructure but partly industries of the future.”
So at least she’s willing to admit it’s not entirely an infrastructure bill. I doubt the rest of the administration will admit the same.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
