A chance to transform US economy
President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan contemplates mammoth investments in infrastructure. It has the potential to be transformational, and not just because of its $2 trillion price tag.
In an era of public-private partnerships, the plan recognizes private investment cannot fill the yawning infrastructure funding gap; it places government front and center as the funder of projects that may not generate healthy revenue streams. It is visionary because it seeks to make our economy smarter and more competitive by focusing on emerging industries like 5G broadband and electric vehicles. By investing billions in home health care workers and other members of the labor force, it controversially expands beyond physical structures the definition of infrastructure to include “human infrastructure.”
Never has a Congress as closely divided as this one is, in a country so polarized, passed a major piece of infrastructure legislation.
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If history were any guide — hopefully, it’s not — the odds of the American Jobs Plan becoming law would seem long, particularly if policy-makers overreach and allow opponents to effectively portray it as an untargeted “liberal wish-list.”
But if Biden manages to seize this moment of challenge and shepherd through Congress a comprehensive infrastructure package, he will be remembered as one of the few presidents who marshalled the powers of the federal government to strengthen our public works, the backbone of any modern, dynamic economy.
Contrary to what we hear from pundits, prodigiously spending money to improve infrastructure traditionally has not been as “American as apple pie.” Ambitious legislators who forget this fact increase the risk of squandering a singular opportunity to invest in our future, one only made possible during disruptive political and economic times – like those we face today.
Through the ages, nations have spent blood and treasure constructing and maintaining what we now call “infrastructure” – a word whose etymology traces only from 1927 and that now connotes structures “built to last” and connecting people, places, or things.
The Roman Empire coalesced thanks partly to its vast network of well-constructed roads stretching more than 250,000 miles and fusing 113 provinces, achieving what one historian called a “reorganization of space.”
China today remains committed to its $4 to $8 trillion Belt and Road Initiative – intended to create a multi-continental Sinocentric trade network of ports, highways, railroads, tunnels, airports, and dams.
But fully funding physical infrastructure to secure our own country’s economic health (not to mention pride) is a road we have rarely taken.
During Antebellum America, Jeffersonian Democrats and states’ rights advocates believed a strong central government both was unconstitutional and threatened slavery and, therefore, vigorously (and successfully) opposed federal investments in “internal improvements.”
Congressional majorities would have nothing to do with the Erie Canal, whose construction was financed with bonds issued by New York State. “If Congress can make canals,” a Southern senator said in 1818, “they can make more property emancipated.”
Washington’s hands-off approach to public works continued for much of the next century. Falling prey to the spread of infectious diseases, urban populations at the turn of the twentieth century had limited access to sanitation systems, a state of affairs summoning to mind Winston Churchill’s pungent observation that there is “little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.”
In 1919, Dwight Eisenhower led the Army’s first transcontinental motor convoy, a 62-day journey that was, according to biographer Jean Edward Smith, “marred by … rain that turned dirt into gumbo … collapsed bridges, deeply rutted roadways, and the absence in places of any roadbed whatsoever.”
This legacy of underinvestment in infrastructure lives on today: The 2021 “report card” issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers calculates an infrastructure funding gap totaling $2.59 trillion.
It should come as no surprise the ASCE assigns our country’s roads a lowly “D.” Congress last raised in 1994 the gasoline tax, which pays for highway and bridge construction. Since then, inflation has increased by 79%. Michigan’s road funding quandary is partly attributable to this erosion of purchasing power.
Thus, any notion the United States traditionally has robustly funded public works misunderstands the history of infrastructure, which has witnessed long periods of stasis or neglect punctuated by rare bursts of federal investment. Those moments occurred only when political stars aligned – usually during a crisis with a Congress dominated by legislators favoring a strong federal government.
It was during the Civil War when Southern secession left Congress controlled by activist Republicans who passed legislation that created the Transcontinental Railroad. (A nearly insolvent federal government later subsidized railroads by deeding unceded Indian lands and resorting to gimmicky “taxless” financing schemes.)
It was during the Great Depression when New Deal Democrats commanded overwhelming majorities and worked with President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Works Progress Administration, which employed millions of laborers to build post offices, schools, dams, and roads that still shape our landscape.
And it was in 1954 when a looming recession spurred President Dwight Eisenhower – recalling his firsthand experience on muddy and makeshift roads decades earlier – to team with a broad congressional coalition of progressives and moderates to create the interstate highway system.
Exceptions to the general rule of chronic infrastructure underfunding are rare, which is why a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography was written about Robert Moses, the New York “power broker” who built ribbons of highway after bending legislatures to his will.
Congressional enactment of the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan would, in one unprecedented stroke, reverse the United States’ centuries-long and rarely interrupted history of underfunding public works — and history will forever have its eyes on him.
Andy Doctoroff, a Huntington Woods attorney, is an adjunct professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School where he teaches a class he created about infrastructure.
