Free Republic

Infrastructure improvements are perennial fodder for politicians on the stump looking to appeal to voters. However, composing a detailed, effective investment plan that goes beyond rhetoric is a much more daunting task that requires careful consideration. President Trump has made it clear he wants to undertake a “new program of national rebuilding” by investing $1 trillion in infrastructure.1 Although the President has stated this funding would be drawn from both public and private sources, he has yet to put forth a detailed plan. Democrats in Congress have seized on the opportunity to put forward their own proposal on infrastructure. This...

Quad City residents are now witnessing the creation of an architectural marvel with the construction of the new Interstate-74 bridge. Two of the world’s largest mobile cranes are employed in the project, along with hundreds of workers, and we are now seeing the concrete base of the center arch rise out from the river bottoms. This remarkable project is made possible by a federal and state government funding partnership that guarantees a dignified wage to the men and women who have been working throughout this brutally cold winter. Called "Davis-Bacon" protections, they were named after two Depression-era Republican congressmen who...

One week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, President George W. Bush consulted with his team of crisis advisers and inundated the Gulf Coast with cheap, illegal alien labor. Bush’s August decision to lift the Davis-Bacon wage law made it very easy for contractors to hire cheap labor. Mike Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), quickly suspended sanctions on the employers who did hire illegal aliens. The result was another flood – this time not of water, but of illegal aliens, 30,000 of which came to the Gulf Coast to take cleanup and blue-collar...

With little income generated by the canals themselves — recreational revenue is about $165,000 a year, commercial only $40,000 — the cost of operating them is now covered largely with highway tolls collected by the Thruway Authority. And the roughly $55 million operating budget for the canals accounted for a large chunk of the $78.5 million in losses the authority reported during the 2014 fiscal year. On top of that are annual capital investments in the tens of millions of dollars to maintain and improve the system. The burden falls largely on highway toll-payers because of a decision in 1992...

... Instead of talking about new laws to enact and regulations to impose, it’s time to start talking about old ones that should be repealed. Your predecessors in office – and quite possibly you – have done grave damage to America with swarms of laws and regulations that take liberty and property away from the people, waste resources, enrich and empower special interest groups, and undermine the rule of law. The very best, most public-spirited thing you could do would be to repeal them. Here is a starter list. The Davis-Bacon Act. This law is a relic of the Depression,...

Lately, labor law issues have been much in the news, including the vote against the UAW at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, and the ruling that college football players are free to unionize. And on March 31, another federal labor statute was the focal point of a court decision, namely the Davis-Bacon Act. Here is the background on the law. In 1931, Republican Congressman Robert Bacon (NY) teamed up with Republican Senator James Davis (PA) to push through a bill to rectify an egregious wrong (at least as they and some of their constituents saw things) – that construction contractors were choosing...

I HAVE already e-mailed my Cong Man, Boehner, Brent Bozell, and a host of others; will you all call/e-mail and pester the cong people? Has anyone ever heard of the Davis Bacon Act? Just think of what it “does”. Take a look around you; See that highway work? See those men lazing in the sun? They are the byproduct of Davis Bacon. Another is the TIME that it takes to work on a Davis Bacon job. In Covington, GA there have been portions of streets, including intersections that have taken years to complete, when they are eventually completed. I am...

Yesterday, the House passed the largely non-controversial Military Construction/Veterans Affairs Appropriations (MilCon) bill for FY 2012. Unfortunately, it is these non-controversial bills which provide a safe haven for meretricious policy initiatives through the rapid fire amendment process. While everyone was focused on presidential politics, the House passed an amendment forcing government contractors to use labor unions on federal construction projects. Oh, and like most bad legislation, this amendment passed by one vote, with the help of 27 Republicans. In 2009, Obama used his signature power grab tool; an Executive Order, forcing all private companies to sign a project labor agreement...

The Davis–Bacon Act (DBA) requires the government to pay construction wages that average 22 percent above market rates. This shields unions from competition on federal construction projects. It will also add $10.9 billion to the deficit in 2011. Given that the federal government is already running historic and unsustainable deficits, federal policy should not unnecessarily inflate the cost of federal construction projects. Congress should repeal the DBA. Unsustainable Spending . DBA Restrictions Increase Costs . Repeal the Davis–Bacon Act . America can no longer afford such special-interest handouts. If Congress is serious about reducing spending or lowering unemployment, it should...

• There has never been a valid reason for courts to allow unions, uniquely, to be free from the consequences of violence and mob behavior used in pursuit of their own economic ends; • Davis-Bacon prevailing wage legislation is and was little more than a union wage protection racket; • Union practices in job targeting, salting, project labor agreements, environmental permitting, living wage requirements, and corporate campaigns are indistinguishable from ordinary blackmail, extortion, and strong-arm work. No, I don’t think unions are good for America. Unions, and particularly unions in the public sector, may well be our literal undoing.

23 projects statewide affected by bill. The 2010 Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill that was signed into law on Oct. 30 by President Barack Obama has reached the Western Slope, and has brought the Glenwood Springs wastewater treatment facility project, and many more around the state, to a screeching halt. the word came last week that the project would have to be put on hold, indefinitely, awaiting further clarification from the Environmental Protection Agency. Hecksel said that he was unsure as to why the Glenwood project would be included because the project was not seeking federal funding... The intent of...

... The Great Depression was caused by misguided government policies adopted to avoid the "unsatisfactory conditions" signaled by the crash. The run-of-the-mill recession that ought to have followed the crash was magnified by the policies of the federal government during the administration of Herbert Hoover. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research published last August, Lee E. Ohanian examines a continuing mistake during the Hoover administration that helped transform difficulty into calamity. An economics professor at UCLA, Ohanian has written numerous papers on the Depression. In one earlier paper, he pinned the persistence of high unemployment on...

The DoD Appropriations Act 2010 passed the house last week without including the Connie Mack amendment that would have removed the Davis-Bacon Act from H.R.3326. We need to get our spending under control. Contact your Senator and let them know that this outdated Act is hurting our recovery efforts. For more info about the DBA and to contact your Senator see Link.

What do the farm bill, the cap-and-trade global warming bill, the clean water bill, the housing bailout bill, and the school construction bill all have in common? Not much, except that in each one and countless others the Democratic majority in Congress has inserted "prevailing-wage" requirements that amount to a super-minimum wage. We're speaking of Davis-Bacon, the 1931 law that originally applied to road building and other federal construction projects and set a floor on wages in part to price black and Mexican workers out of the work. Today, its main impact is to require de facto union wages. Many...

“While Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) commends the Senate for approving the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (S. 2611), we are very concerned that this important legislation will vastly expand antiquated and wasteful Davis-Bacon Act wage laws," said Kirk Pickerel, ABC president and CEO. “We fully support the underlying principles of this legislation and applaud the Senate for working to reform our nation’s broken immigration system. However, Associated Builders and Contractors cannot support a measure that recklessly extends Davis-Bacon Act provisions to temporary workers on private construction projects, where the act does not traditionally apply. “The Davis-Bacon Act is a depression-era...

The (Senate) bill extends Davis-Bacon “prevailing wage” provisions—typically the area’s union wage that applies only to construction on federal projects under current law—to all occupations (e.g. roofers, carpenters, electricians, etc.) covered by Davis-Bacon. So guest-workers (but not citizen workers) must be paid Davis-Bacon wage rates for jobs in the private sector if their occupation is covered by Davis-Bacon. Presumably because Senate Democrats’ union bosses thought this provision too modest, an amendment by Senator Barack Obama, approved by voice vote, extended Davis-Bacon wages rates to all private work performed by guest workers, even if their occupations are not covered by Davis-Bacon.

Washington intrigue has sent stocks gyrating again. But the fundamentals remain strong. The period of extremely low stock-market volatility that I wrote about over the summer seems to be history. Back then stocks, as measured by the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, were behaving about as tranquilly as they have at any time since such records started being kept. At the lows in mid-July, there had been only 14 other days in the past two decades when stock-market volatility had been lower. It wasn't a very exciting time for fast-money speculators, perhaps, but it was a wonderful, low-risk environment for...

A leading Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday said President Bush has agreed to restore the provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act in the areas battered last month by Hurricane Katrina "because he had no other choice."

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush used his executive branch authority to suspend the Depression-era Davis-Bacon law that mandates so-called “prevailing wages” for all federal construction work projects. Since recent press reports predict at least $200 billion in new construction costs to rebuild the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Mississippi, this suspension stands to save the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. The Davis-Bacon Act, passed in 1931, requires all federal contractors to pay prevailing wages, almost always the local union wage, on construction projects of more than $2,000 that are wholly or partly funded...

As the death toll across the Gulf Coast rises, one of the largest reconstruction efforts in American history begins. An estimated 400,000 jobs have been lost, and 1 million Americans have been displaced from their homes. Workers who have found the courage to return to their devastated communities suffered another blow last week when President Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act. Davis-Bacon ensures that workers who perform similar jobs for government contractors are paid the local prevailing wage. In New Orleans, where a quarter of the residents lived in poverty before Hurricane Katrina, that wage was $8.49 an hour for service...