Will: Infrastructure spending won’t transform America

“MASON CITY: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.”

WASHINGTON — Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring for “internal improvements,” as infrastructure was known in the 19th century when canals, and then railroads, transformed America.

What rural electrification was eight decades ago, broadband access might be today: a blessing not widely enough enjoyed. But infrastructure spending will not have the economically and socially transformative effect that it had before America became a mature urban society. Princeton historian James M. McPherson writes that before all-weather macadamized roads, it cost the same to move a ton of goods 30 miles inland as it cost to bring a ton across the Atlantic. The person who would become the 16th president began his public career advocating canal construction in Illinois, and in 1849, before he became a prosperous railroad lawyer, he received U.S. patent 6469 for a device to facilitate boats’ passages over sand bars and shallow water.

Some historians even suggest that there might not have been a Civil War for him to win if the fourth president, James Madison, had not vetoed (on constitutional grounds; he thought that no enumerated power authorized Congress to do such things) the infrastructure bill of South Carolina’s Sen. John C. Calhoun, who became a secessionist firebrand. . . .

I cannot see the words "Obama" and "Infrastructure" without feeling my blood pressure begin to rise. I have not posted this in a while, but this long post illustrates amply WHY that kind of "infrastructure spending" is just a damned pig trough for people to swill money out of for whatever they wanted to. (This post was from back in 2010-2012 sometime...

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I have to sometimes take a breath. I don't WISH for a company to go out of business, and I don't even generally mind that some of my tax dollars are used to help people get retrained. But when it is UNIONS that put someone out of work, and MY money is used to retrain people who have been put out of work because of it, it makes me angry, because unions are wasteful and selfish, and we end up having to clean up the mess.

I can't tell you how angry I was when I recently tried to find out how many dollars from the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" were used to build a state of the art visitor center on the grounds of a national park near me.

Sudbury, Massachusetts is near where I live, it is one of the wealthiest communities in the state, and is located some twenty miles due west of Boston. In Sudbury, there was an old, abandoned Army base that had been closed up for years, and sometime in the last ten years or so, it was opened to the public to be able to walk through. It was great.

Not many people knew about it or knew it was open, and one could walk on dilapidated old crumbling roads through the woods, punctuated by an occasional boarded up decaying building. Most interestingly, there are a series of huge concrete munitions bunkers with evidence of railroad (possibly small gage) that serviced the bunkers, and on a few of them, you could get inside to find old, empty metal desks, light fixtures in the overhead with old fashioned incandescent bulbs in them.

To anyone who has ever lived on military installations, it has that general air of decay you know you could sniff out in the remote accesses even on some large active bases. As someone who grew up as a military brat and spent many hours exploring such ignored areas, that type of thing has always had a kind of charm for me. Anyway, it was great, and always deserted. Just about two years ago, I began to see evidence of activity...backhoes, roads being paved and such. It was a real disappointment, and I stopped going there for a while. Then, last winter, my wife and I went for a wintertime snow walk there, and came across this facility:

Now, just seeing that sign makes my blood pressure go up, but as I looked over the facility, I got angrier and angrier.

There was apparently no expense spared to build this facility, everything built of the highest quality materials, I do believe there were solar electricity panels on the roof (not sure though) but it didn't look like they skimped on anything. As I looked through the windows of the closed facility, I think I even saw Herman Miller chairs in what looked like an office. Bottom line, I see this, and figure they probably spent at LEAST a million or two on this facility, probably more, and now have it staffed with a park ranger or two. All this money WE DON'T HAVE for one or two government employee FTE's. Don't get me wrong, I like parks and such. BUT YOU DON'T SPEND MONEY YOU HAVE TO BORROW TO BUILD THEM! If times are prosperous, just maybe you can do it, but when we have a debt burden of $500,000 per household in this country, it is INSANITY to spend money on this type of thing.

So I decided to try to find out just how much of the "stimulus" was spent on this boondoggle. There is a website in Massachusetts to monitor the distribution of the stimulus funds at Massachusetts Recovery Website (which is most likely a dead link now) as an an attempt to live up to the Obama administration's promise of "transparency".

On the site, you can dig around in a variety of ways to see data, one way to slice it is by project, another shows funds by zip code. Unfortunately, they make it so you cannot download all the funds for all Massachusetts zip codes, but at least you can download data for a given zip code for a given fiscal quarter. Now, I never did find out how much was spent on that facility. But what I did find out was interesting.

I downloaded the data for 01776 (oh, the IRONY at that zip code) in successive passes for each fiscal quarter and got them all into an Excel spreadsheet. Once there, I used a pivot table to slice the data in a variety of ways. The column on the left is a general category, and the categories from left to right are subcategories of that. I specified that I only wanted to see the top four, and specifically excluded the Police and Firefighter components, but since the total money awarded was $25.2 million and this table shows an expenditure of $23.13 million, that means all other expenditures for this community that I didn't show totaled just over two million dollars. So my table below shows the lion's share.

(I only showed money awarded, not money used, but gee whiz, is anyone concerned they would get awarded the money and not use it? I'm not...)

As I went through the data, I kept seeing an entry for Minuteman Nashoba Heath, and it was a large chunk twice a year. Doing a search on the Internet showed this website: Minuteman Nashoba Health Group (I thought this would be a dead link, but they have gone from being specialist health care insurance for teachers, town employees, firefighters, police unions etc, to offering health care to others...but back they, they only did teacher union healthcare, I believe). They describe themselves as such:

"The Minuteman Nashoba Health Group (MNHG) WAS a coalition of Massachusetts towns and school districts that have joined together to purchase health benefits for their employees, retirees, and their eligible dependents. Joint purchasing of health benefits gives the participating governmental employers purchasing clout to help keep costs under control. The MNHG has been operational since 1990 and has added several towns to its membership in the last several years." I don't know what the cost for healthcare is for teachers in that town, but it looks from a couple of things I have seen that teachers might contribute between 20-30% of their own money towards their premium. Bottom line, you folks down in Texas, all you Freepers in California, even you Sooners out in Oklahoma, your tax dollars are all paying for the health care of unionized Massachusetts teachers.

I am not choosing Sudbury, MA for analysis because of some perceived corruption. I don't believe it is any more or less corrupt than any other community in this country. It just happened to be the community I was looking at to find out about something else, and this fell out of it. I fully expect that if I were to do this analysis on my town (which I will do) or any other locality in this state or throughout the country, we might find similar activity. What is unspeakable in my opinion is the fact that we took hundreds of billions of dollars we didn't have, and opened the coffers for every community around the nation to dip their hands into. To me, this is the equivalent of a family that cannot meet their mortgage (or their second and third concurrent and outstanding Home Equity Loan) pay their car insurance or keep up with any of the other bills they have incurred, taking out a fourth home equity loan, withdrawing it in cash and distributing it throughout the family. "Hey everyone, I'm going to buy a new boat, Mom is going to get a sports car, you kids can take the rest of this and spend it on whatever you wish! Computers, video games, clothes, whatever you want! You don't have to tell me precisely what you are doing with it (and even if you do tell me, I'll just wink and approve!) and you won't have to pay any of it back! This is FREE MONEY, and we are going to have a great time with it!" We have heard people say the whole stimulus bill is a scam. From day one, I have believed it. We have heard many say that this stimulus was supposed to provide "shovel ready jobs" that would stimulate the economy, but from looking at the expenditures, it is clear that, in one of the single, wealthiest communities in Massachusetts, 25 million dollars of stimulus money was spent, and the vast majority of it appears to be spent not on "shovel ready jobs" (whatever the HELL that means) but instead for paying for unemployment benefits, benefits for teachers and other "unspecified" educational costs (that detail could not be teased out of the spreadsheet, since it is not broken down that way). Spending the money on unemployment benefits may or may not be the best use for that money, but I think there should have at least been a dialogue about the wisdom of using it. It might indeed be the best use of our taxpayer money, but nobody got to even discuss it. It was just used to pay for these things...AND THOSE USES WERE NOT WHAT THE "STIMULUS" WAS SOLD AS. Brain dead liberals think that pumping borrowed/printed money back into the hands of the unemployed so it can be used to pay bills actually STIMULATES an economy. (Ask Nancy Pelosi...SHE thinks it does, and has said so.) It doesn't, but people who believe in socialism think it does. And socialists are running the show now.

Many of us recognize that the stimulus was a bill of goods, being used primarily by many communities to cover shortfalls, and who could blame those communities for doing so. But the unimpeachable idiocy of declaring that this money was going to stimulate anything is apparent, and it is yet another instance of the dishonesty of the liberals (and so-called "conservatives") who not only supported this expenditure the first time around, but are now pushing for more money WE DON'T HAVE to be thrown down the rat-hole.

And I do mean "Rat-Hole".

And it is a UNION Rathole. Using MY money to pay for it.

The problems we face are many fold and many are interrelated

We have a crushing multi trillion budget deficit and much of the deficit is related to servicing welfare and disability payments to able body workers pushed into government welfare during the Obama years.

Getting these able bodied workers back into the workforce is vital towards a politically viable solution resolving the workplace participation crisis that is killing our economy and driving budget deficits.

Unfortunately, the irrational dislocations of the 8 years of the Obama economy was a disaster and we need a rapid means of kick starting job creation to get idle workers off welfare and back to work and real infrastructure programs are an effective way to help kick start broad based job creation in a multitude of economic sectors and get Americans out of the welfare trap the Obama Administration forced many millions of Americans into .

Infrastructure spending also jump starts heavy industry sectors such as mining, coal, steel, aluminum that were forced to shutter during the Obama years.

We are currently in a dysfunctional economy driven to a stilted, unsustainable, unstable and failing false equilibrium point by the insane, destructive economic policies under Obama that are held together by a toxic and unsustainable mix of massive deficit spending, reliance on a flood of cheap imports, reliance on cheap illegal alien labor and erosion of America's industrial , technological and skilled labor base.

Currently, we are really in a slow motion economic crisis that has been going on for over a decade and whose steady erosion and the gradual but constant bleeding is dooming our country to death and destruction by a million cuts.

We really are in one of the most severe crisis our country has faced and there are no good, easy and painless solutions to right the cumulative wrongs of decades of bad economic decisions

President Trump did not put us where we we are and he is trying to right the ship of state and rebuild our economy, our industrial base and our domestic employment base.

All of his critics have a very legitimate and valid concerns and the risks they warn of are real.

Unfortunately , these same critics and commentators are the biggest proponents of the the very mindset and conventional wisdom of the status quo that has put us into the existential crisis we currently are in and they are , at least in part, architect of the disaster we see unfolding.

Trump clearly understands the crisis we face and is taking bold and effective steps to address the crisis in as many mutually supporting solutions as possible.

The best analogy is that Trump assumed the Presidency at a time when we were engaged in multiple losing wars (figurative and literal) not of his choosing and having options form corrective action that are both limited and not particularly good .

The President is working virtual miracles with what he has to work with, but are way past the point of having the option of cheap, easy , risk free and painless fixes

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