America (Washington Insider Magazine) -As the fate of two spending packages, both the bipartisan and reconciliation bills, hang in the congressional balance, primarily thanks to a couple of Democratic Senators and a few Representatives, the political tension across Washington and the country at large is becoming sharper and sharper by the day; the looming debt ceiling issues haven’t helped nerves and anxieties either, to be sure. Senator Joe Manchin, who was recently seen as he was being accosted on his yacht, or “houseboat,” as his supporters refer to it as, by those supporters of the larger reconciliation bill, has been a continuous detractor of so many parts of this bill, and a general thorn in the side of the President and Democratic Senators during this process, while Senator Kyrsten Sinema has found herself defending her recalcitrance at every turn as well, including as she recently fled into a bathroom. In response to each Senators’ continued prevarications, the Junior Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders said quite recently that “…two people do not have the right to sabotage what 48 want…”; and yet, this is absolutely where we are currently at regarding this process within the Democratic-controlled Senate
Republicans were never expected to support this second, much larger bill, yet the Democratic Senators from both West Virginia and Arizona have proven difficult to budge too. Each Senator has, in their own words, said that the reconciliation bill is simply too much spending, and that the economy is already “overheating” as it is, while inflation will run utterly wild with further spending bills; they continue to say that they are representing their constituents and their constituents own needs and desires by refusing to coalesce with the rest of the greater Democratic Party in Congress; they continue to use their Republican colleagues terms and excuses while the Democrats en masse are looking to enact deeply popular innovations for the entire population. Yet while Senator’s Manchin and Sinema state and declare all of these sentiments, like on entitlements, for example, there is little in reality that backs up their assessments of either of their duties, the feelings of the American people, or their total and entire needs.
For if we were to ignore public opinion polls, the economic data, potential jobs created, conjecture and the like, the fact still remains that America’s infrastructure, in the many ways that it can be defined, requires major innovation; the “hard” infrastructure is often old, dilapidated, in many places antiquated, and this unequivocally hurts not only the volition of the country here and now, but the very ambition of the people that will make it up moving forward, both personally and professionally. Meanwhile, the “soft” infrastructure in many regions of the country is woefully inadequate, underdeveloped, underfunded, if not entirely nonexistent; this inhibits growth and evolution itself in these locations, while subtly coercing the population to leave for elsewhere as well. All of this is ultimately detrimental to each state, as well as the greater United States of America at large.
“I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
Joe Biden is not really bowing to Progressive Democrats as much as to the global reality of a socially and economically interconnected world; as he stated recently, the reconciliation bill is definitively his. Internal domestic investments across the globe by certain nations are innovating cities, districts, providences, regions, states, and the very countries themselves, giving certain polities distinct practical, ecological, and economic advantages heading into the future. The 46th President, for all of his shortcomings, sees this as clearly as the Progressives of Congress and America at large. He knows that, much like the great and famous infrastructural bills passed during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his record stay in the White House, as well as that Federal-Aid Highway Act, passed in 1956 by a Democratic Congress, led by the Senate Majority leader, the Senator from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, under the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the long term benefits of investing in America, generally speaking, far outweigh the costs of the bill itself, which, in congressional terms, is not even terribly expensive. This is particularly true when one further considers what one is proverbially “buying” with this investment in the people of the United States themselves.
That last one I mentioned, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was, somehow, amongst the last major, innovative and profound “hard” infrastructure bills of its type in the nation’s history, and in many ways, has brought us up to this point in time. To be sure, the common roads, as well as inter and intrastate highways that were built over decades thanks to this act and its forebears, those Federal Acts of both 1916 and 1921, have aided countless American’s in their personal or professional activities, as well as the greater economy at large, despite not being cheap to build or maintain. Yet much of the infrastructure that was built with these funds have since fallen into disrepair thanks to various reasons, including a lack of maintenance, natural old age, as well as material failures.
The same can be said regarding areas where hospitals and doctors are few and far between, and where they exist, do so without the proper staffing, equipment, and technology to do their jobs both efficiently and safely. It can be said about small, isolated towns where innovation, whether public or private, has not created new, meaningful avenues for people of those regions to exert their efforts into, and where, as a result, the populations either stagnate or leave for places where there are possibilities; where schools are lacking, and where teachers, funding for education, resources for the teachers and children, as well as their salaries, are minimal and in the case of the wages, sub-livable; where the roads that are seen are many of the same roads that were laid down decades ago, and where the electrical, plumbing and water situations are often more dire than many Americans would think possible for other Americans inside of the country itself.
These are many of the problems that plague towns and populations across the United States, and this is not even discussing the further assistance that larger cities, holding more people and generally producing quite a bit more economic activity than their rural counterparts, would acquire were this bill to pass. They could use innovations of the hard and soft infrastructural systems in their lives as well and, again, the benefits of investing in the entire country, cities, suburbs and the rural communities included, should make deals of this kind not only a no-brainer for all of the Democratic Party, but for the Republican Party too.
These bills, both partisan and bipartisan bills, will be benefiting all of the country, not exclusively those counties, districts or states whose representatives voted for it. This is a brace of massive plans that, only together, could truly transform the nation into a more equitable, sustainable, fair, and just polity, in all of the ways that the bills address. This includes hard infrastructure like roads, highways, buildings, institutions, poles, wires, rails, and all the rest of which Republicans claim to be the only definition of infrastructure.
Yet it also features an expanded version of the child tax credit, which, if made permanent, would cement and likely increase the gains this nation has made against the absolute blight of childhood poverty. Two free years of community college and the expansion of internet access to communities across the country look to create an intellectual base, while simultaneously broadening the intellectual understanding and ambitions of all Americans, regardless of their backgrounds, while universal child care and pre-Kindergarten aim, like the expanded child tax credit (CTC), to relieve some of the stresses of having children as the childbirth rates continue to drop across both the United States as well as the world.
It features money for green incentives and innovations, like for consumers when they purchase an electric vehicle, and for capitalists when they invest in roadside electric charging stations; it also includes plans for the further of clean energy solutions to coal and oil, which would help to power these new electrical charging stations, putting America on a truly clean, sustainable and renewable course moving into the future. Indeed, fighting climate change is one of the most important things for a large majority of young people in, not only America, but the world today, and the fact that this reconciliation bill takes this into consideration, even if not as quickly as many scientists demand at this point, would be a step in a less nihilistic direction by one of the most powerful governments on the face of the earth.
Expanded Medicare, while not Medicare For All (M4A) as much of the nation is on record as being in support of, is better than nothing, especially in this time of COVID-19 and any future plagues that might sweep the globe in the coming years. Cutting the cost of prescription drugs is a must as well, and in a similar vein as expanding Medicare, while a federal policy of paid family and medical leave would only put the United States on par with nations like Canada, who offer all of the above currently, and have for some time too.
These are innovations that the people of the country generally want. These are innovations that not only look to improve the physical structures of our America, but the very health of the people who use them, as well as the systems, institutions, and procedures that operate and function within these physical means and structures. Therefore, the potential for real progress and change across the country in general from these dual pieces of legislation is massive, and also critical. For aside from the dangerous ecological circumstance we as a species find ourselves battling, it is worth noting once again that the infrastructure of the United States is noticeably decaying, to put it nicely, thanks to negligence across nearly 70 years.
America, in this as in many other ways, is much like a house where, while everyone is so busy working to make money and advance within their chosen field or path over the years, the domicile itself, constantly and consistently being used and lived in, invariably wears down and begins to deteriorate. In this example, the constituent members of the house are generally, ignoring landlords, going to be responsible for bearing the costs of fixing the house together, collectively, because they all benefit from the house being in the best condition it can possibly be in for practical, functional purposes, aside from the economic and financial consequences of real estate of course.
And so would these hypothetical folks, in their desire to fix up their residence, focus only on the framing, or the physical layout or structure of the house? Or would they, instead, appraise the antiquated or dilapidated walls and plumbing, sheetrock, as well as internet and electrical connections and access, as all being relevant in the goal to fix up their house? When appraising their place, any person would analyze the entirety of it, which includes, as previously demonstrated, not only the house as a tangible, protective structure, but as one which provides ancillary benefits, which must be taken care of and maintained as well; one does not look at America and ask oneself only if America and Americans need new roads, highways, and other hard infrastructural innovations alone, but if they need new systems of healthcare, public transit, public education, public health and access to resources as well.
The United States has been living in a proverbial house that was largely finished and subsequently furnished by pre and post-World War II capital, generations, and infrastructure bills. Meanwhile, those people and generations who’ve been since charged with maintaining the country have for too long simply concerned themselves with other innovations, other endeavors, and other interests instead. The country has done so, however, while wearing down and wearing out much of what was built and created during those time periods. Have isolated innovations been made in particular cities, sectors, and states? Undoubtedly. They can be witnessed first hand when one visits cities across the country, from Denver and Las Vegas, to Minneapolis, Boston, New York City, and countless others, yet this is not enough.
The rest of the country, the vast, relatively sparsely filled, endlessly diverse nation, and particularly West Virginia, needs both of these infrastructure plans, in fact, as bad, if not more desperately than those massive cities on either coasts or anywhere else, despite how the cities would immensely benefit from them all the same. While smaller cities and larger towns in these regions lose population density, further economic volition, and workers, amongst so many other things, because of the recalcitrance to both fix, innovate and maintain itself, while developing newer, alternative professional avenues for their populations to pursue, those reactionary officials in control often tell a very different story of America and its economic circumstances. They often deride and insinuate that “liberal” cities, far from producing the great majority of national economic output, are either endless cesspools of crime, wasted expenditures, foreigners, general moral depravity, welfare spending, and liberal or leftist extremists; they foment great animosity in this way, essentially suggesting that, without those incredibly densely populated cities, more money might be more readily available or applicable for their own states and infrastructural needs.
This is the pure politicization, however, of what should be an obviously bipartisan, slamdunk agenda; talk to the contrary must be readily ignored, as well as derided itself if possible. Before anything else, cities are actually good for the development and prosperity of rural areas. Furthermore, for a country that spends endless sums of money on exercises such as waging endless and brutal armed conflict abroad, continuously arming and developing the military for various purposes, of which includes the previously stated expenditure, as well as arming and militarizing the very police that patrol our towns and cities, it is truly difficult, nigh impossible, to convince me that there is, in fact, no money to be had to enact legislation that is paid for across a ten year period of time; using this logic in one breath to curtail spending on the American society, while endlessly increasing funding for the Military, the Police and oligarchs through the tax code in the next one, demonstrates how flimsy the logic itself truly is. There is money for legislation that the Congress deems worthy of money, and none for those bills, concepts, notions, or ideas of which Congress does not support; while it does not matter how much money societal innovations cost when juxtaposed with what they will provide and continue providing, long into the future, as has been said by others, the bill is not so much 3.5 trillion dollars as it is 350 billion dollars a year for ten years.
That matters, quite frankly, and must be better understood by the general public. The United States of America spends much more than 350 billion dollars each year on things that do not provide the same long-term benefits for each American as the innovations strewn throughout the reconciliation bill; The United States Space Force is, all things considered, a great example of a remarkably expensive and woefully idiotic institution and/or concept to fund while arguing about developing cities and towns across the country through infrastructural innovations that could go a long way towards keeping the planet we currently all live on in livable conditions heading into the future. Two trillion-dollar tax breaks for the wealthy, meanwhile, is almost never a socially positive maneuver, especially when it is not paid for by some other, new, or different economic activity in turn; that Trump move remains a bold bit of theft and wealth redistribution by the 45th President. Yet, on the other hand, investing in the internal dynamics of one’s country, as the 46th President demands, is wise and forward-thinking, and will yield results proportional to the initial investments in question.
“Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.” – Epicurus
Not everyone would agree, however, that the government investing in American society in these various ways produces positive innovations and results. An argument might be heard expressed by some reactionary stan or representative, stating that, while it is important to maintain and develop our society, that it should be left to private practice as often as possible, and that keeping the expenditures of government down are ideologically paramount to them. Yet these pronouncements too, are difficult to reconcile with reality when one takes the sheer emptiness and velocity of economic expenditure of two of their greatest champions into consideration.
The two terms of Ronald Reagan saw, to that point, the greatest difference between starting and finishing debt of any President since FDR; during this time, he helped to turn America back into a global debtor nation once again as well. He too, like Donald Trump, slashed taxes, helping to move vast fortunes from the American people up to the American oligarchy, in such a devastating manner, that his successor, his former Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, actually had to break a campaign promise and readjust the tax brackets in his own single term to compensate for the vast losses previously sustained by his predecessors’ action.
Meanwhile, the Donald Trump tax cuts, of which will hopefully not last for very long, helped to ensure that the national debt, would, in only a single Presidential term, balloon from approximately 20 trillion dollars, to nearly 28 trillion dollars; while, in contrast to Reagan, the difference in debt by percentage is lower than might be expected, the addition of nearly seven trillion dollars worth of debt is easily the most of any President, no matter how many terms they won. Trump was, in fact, spending money at an incredible clip even before the very necessary COVID-19 expenditures, of which the 45th President was oftentimes hesitant to support during the beginning of the American COVID crisis. And if all of that wasn’t worse enough, it is now more widely understood than before that the lauded Trump tax breaks were, and remain, a scam, designed to benefit the wealthiest while barely benefiting, with a few exceptions, the poorer, mass majority of the United States.
In both of these instances, while great deals of money were spent on policy or for practical purposes, it is important to keep in mind that, contrasting with administrations like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s, or even Barack Obama’s, no long term boon for the greater population, in the form of some greater access to healthcare, education, livable wages, meaningful work, or general well being and sustainability, accompanied either Republican spending sprees. They were conceived, in some form or another, essentially, as kickbacks to entrenched wealth and power, both public and private, and will be historically judged in this way, during an era in which great swaths of humanity both within and without America lay suffering and dying, if only without the means and resources to save and better their circumstances.
While America has undoubtedly invested greatly in material and physical resources, in concepts, technology, businesses, and means for making money, America has not, as John Kenneth Galbraith stated so many years ago, invested as well in the people that make up the nation. There is no universal higher education, nor is there truly universal healthcare, as the recent and still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic exposed more blatantly than ever before. There are communities all across the nation, most of them in fact, where the drinking water is tainted, full of deadly forever chemicals, and unfit for consumption or even practical purposes. There is poverty, in the richest nation to this point in human history, and it diminishes both the nation and the dreams of the millions who suffer in this state through no personal fault of their own. There are school children who do not have access at home to, not only clean water, and sometimes electricity, but to the internet, the greatest information resource of all time, and so must go to public businesses to acquire wifi if a public library is not accessible to them; many schools and school districts still rely on student-parent fundraisers to bridge the financial gaps that leave some children without art or music, or leave them with textbooks from the Clinton administration, or beyond.
All of this is, to be sure, infrastructure; yes, people themselves are, without question, infrastructure. Education, healthcare, as well as the distribution and accessibility of resources in relation to the people, can all and should all be considered as infrastructure in the same way that roads, highways, buildings, pipes, and poles are. Both Hard and Soft infrastructures work in harmony with one another when things are running most optimally, and so must be considered equally as important to care, develop and include within an evolving society as the other; without people, and well taken care of, educated and optimistic people at that, of every age, ethnicity, and background, all of the hard infrastructure in the world would be nothing more than meaningless buildings of steel, stone, limestone, and wood, bereft of use or purpose. Indeed, the Biden administration understands and sees clearly on this front that the greater the investment into America and its people, the greater the return will inevitably be for the nation and its many peoples.
This is positive, for as climate change becomes more devastating and obvious, as economic conditions, possibilities, and opportunities deteriorate for average, everyday citizens, the solutions that are created to fix the problems will have to begin to hit away at the root causes of the problems at hand, and will have to be as radical as the danger of which they are being implemented to fix or stop. Therefore, neither the domestic or global economies, nor the earth’s ecological condition, can be steadied or remedied in the short or long terms, without attacking those elements of both of which are causing the most major and detrimental harm to each in the first instances; to do better for this earth and the organisms that share it with us, we must become not only a more economically open-minded, imaginative, equitable and sustainable society, but a more ecologically equitable, sustainable, and green organism and mass of civilizations.
“These are the stakes,” as was famously stated by a former President in 1964; “…we must either love each other, or we must die.” While Lyndon B Johnson was, at that time, referencing the possibility of utter nuclear annihilation, threatened by his Republican opponent in that election, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, it is difficult to argue that the choices are very much different now than they were then.
These two economic packages, together, can really help to put America on a path towards a more fair and reasonable economy for the younger people still so full of ambitions, desires, and hope, within a world of which is not melting and reconfiguring itself at an incredibly accelerated rate. Without them, both of them, it is just another reminder to the younger successors of the older generations that tax breaks, endless wars, armaments contracts, military and policing budgets are more important than the very future of which these young people will live to see; after all, as the famous Albert Camus once said, “La vraie générosité envers l’avenir consiste à donner tout au présent,” or “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
