Mathew Kahn discusses the ramifications of the major transportation spending recently passed by the US Congress. Of course, as the pie chart shows, infrastructure as many people think of it—construction or improvement of bridges, highways, roads, rail and subways, ports, waterways, and airports—accounts for only $157 billion, or 7%, of the plan’s estimated cost.  Still that is a lot of money (“A billion here, a billion there, and soon it adds up to real money”–US Senator), and Kahn provides a list of concerns in his article What Insights Does Economics Offer About the Nascent Biden Administration Transport Infrastructure Investment Program?   Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The Washington Post has published a piece stating that the Secretary of Transportation, Peter Buttigieg, is the big winner of the Biden Infrastructure Bill as he will be attending many ribbon cutting ceremonies as grateful local mayors shake his hand.

Economic research offers many insights here about the efficiency and equity effects of this multi-billion dollar investment.

Point #1: This is an irreversible investment. When a city builds a new subway line, this billion dollar project cannot be later sold on Ebay and use the $ to do something else. In contrast to light rail and subway lines, dedicated buses feature more option value because they can be sold off or redeployed on different routes in the same city. Given that we don’t know how cities will develop over time, this real option has value.

Point #2; Past expansions of public transit have not significantly increased ridership with the exception of Washington DC. In the case of Los Angeles, improves in rail service (such as the Light Rail on Exposition that I ride) has taken bus riders away from the bus. See our 2005 paper. If crime rates continue to be a concern in cities then the middle class will be even less likely to use the “shiny new” infrastructure. The poor do rely on public transit to move around cities and an expansion will improve their quality of life. An economist would ask whether they value this benefit more than the cash equivalent?

Point #3: The older infrastructure in the nation is located in older cities, where the population is barely growing (or shrinking) and where the voters are mainly Democrats.

Point #4: The highways tend to be built in the suburbs where the voting base leans Republican. My 2011 Brookings piece with David offers several constructive ideas for how to “build back better” here.

Point #5: If progressive cities gain better infrastructure due to the Biden Investment AND if they don’t build much housing (the progressive city NIMBYism is well documented) , then housing prices will rise and the poor and middle class will be further squeezed by this new investment.

Point #6: There are many economics consulting firms that intentionally offer extremely optimistic ridership estimates ex-ante and this helps ambitious government officials to justify projects (i.e to say that it passes a cost/benefit test) when in reality — ex-post evaluations show low usage of the new infrastructure. See Pickrell 1992.

Point #7: Given that unions are powerful in progressive cities, what is the marginal cost of infrastructure creation in these cities? Is the Department of Transportation seeking to build a new capital stock or to enrich a special interest group that supports the Democrats? How many middle class new construction jobs will be created? Will the expansion of the public capital stock crowd out the expansion of the private capital stock as construction crews work on transport infrastructure rather than building private sector projects? What is the shape of the construction supply curve?

Point #8, once the new infrastructure is completed — will this greatly improve urban quality of life in cities such as Baltimore that have been shrinking? How will the Mayor and local civic leaders and private sector stakeholders change their investments and policy decisions? What positive synergies might emerge? Our 2021 Unlocking Book explores some of these themes of investment co-ordination between the private and the public sector.

Previously in August Victor Davis Hanson suggested several theories that might explain how Biden’s administration has destroyed everything they touch.  A summary of that essay is reprinted later on, but this post presents another possible explanation.  James Lewis writes at American Thinker Biden’s cobra presidency.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Have you noticed how Joe Biden says he wants to lower gas prices, so he cancels the Keystone pipeline?

He wants to lower unemployment, so he pays people not to work?

He wants to beat inflation, so the Fed prints more money?

Biden is President Perverse.

The Cobra Effect is economics slang for “perverse incentives.” If you give your kid money every time the kid misbehaves, that’s a perverse incentive. Every parent knows that mandates are perverse. You don’t give your teenager money to buy cocaine. (Or maybe Joe does.)

Conservatives wonder if Joe’s brain is beyond its sell-by date, but that isn’t quite right.

The resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave isn’t just failing; he does the opposite of a competent president. He’s perverse.

The Cobra Effect is a sort of an economics joke based on the story that New Delhi had too many cobras at one time, so the city paid a bounty for dead cobras. Then smart Indian people started to raise more cobras to get the bounty, the opposite of the intended outcome.  Economists use that story to explain economic stupidity.

But Joe Biden has topped stupid and is now the most deliberately perverse POTUS in history.
It’s the only explanation I can think of.

Do you want to stop racism? Teach people how to hate white folks. Are you laughing yet, America?

These are angry, bitter, hateful people with more than a little sadistic glee in their makeup.

You say you love America, and you do your worst?

This is the twisted face of hatred.

It’s Joe Biden’s Cobra presidency.

Background from previous post Biden Has the Destructive Touch

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.  [For details on the listed failures see the article linked in red.]

The Afghan Catastrophe

The Inflation Fiasco

The Border Disaster

Energy Insufficiency

The Race Calamity

The Crime Explosion

So why does Biden so willfully exercise this destructive touch that blows up anything he taps?

There are several possible theories:

1) Biden is non compos mentis. He has no idea of what he is doing. But to the degree he is alert, Biden listens—sort of—only to the last person with whom he talks. And then he takes a nap. When Afghanistan blows up or inflation roars or the border becomes an entry door, his eyes open, and he becomes bewildered and snarly—like an irritable and snappy Bruce Dern waking up in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

Biden has no clue about the actual destructive implementation of his toxic policies, and no concern upon whom these destructive agendas fall. He vaguely assumes a lapdog left-wing media will repackage every Biden incoherence as Periclean, and every daily “lid” as Biden’s escape for presidential research, deep reading, and intensive deliberation. Biden appears to be about where Woodrow Wilson was in November 1919.

2) Or is Biden a rank opportunist and thinking he will ride woke leftism as the country’s new trajectory? He resents his prior subservience to Obama, and now feels he can trump past signature leftist administrations as the one true and only socialist evolutionary. He is not so much the manipulated as the manipulator.

Biden fantasizes himself as a hands-on dynamic leader who bites at reporters, snaps from the podium, and issues his customary interjections. He is therefore “in command” for four or five hours a day. He enjoys acting more radical than Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or “the squad.”—and especially being far more leftwing than his old and now passé boss Barack Obama. Joe is in control and that explains the dross touch. For the first time in his life, such an incompetent has complete freedom—to be powerfully incompetent. Biden is then not demented as much as delusionally running things.

3) Biden is unfortunately what he always was: a rather mean-spirited plagiarist, liar, and nihilist, from his Clarence Thomas character assassination infamy and Tara Reade groping to his foul racist talk and his monumental habitual grifting. His disasters are the same old, same old Biden trademark, performance-art screw-ups.

Biden likes the idea of conservative outrage, of chaos, of barking at everyone all the time. Biden accepts that no omelets can be made without broken eggs, and sort of enjoys screwing up things, as Robert Gates and Barack Obama both warned. “Wokening” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, encouraging hundreds of thousands to pour across the border, and abandoning our NATO allies in Afghanistan—who cares when tough guy, brash-talking Joe on the move jumbles stuff up? The disasters in the economy, foreign policy, crime, energy, and racial relations? Biden is just shaking things up, stirring the pot, baiting people to watch Mr. “Come On, Man” in action, as he blusters and preens and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.

4) Biden is nothing much at all. He’s just a cardboard-cut out, a garden-variety Democratic Party hack, who is against anything conservatives are for. He assumes he will undo all that Trump did, on the theory it is simple and easy for him in his lazy, senior moments. And he is tired anyway of thinking much beyond such Pavlovian rejectionism. A closed border is bad; presto, open borders are good. Improving race relations is bad; deteriorating relations must be good. Energy independence bad; dependency good. Biden works on autopilot in his minimalist day job: just cancel anything that Trump did and worry nothing about the effects on the American people

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target. The Left ensured the base would not bolt in 2020. So, he owes them. Biden, more or less, signed his presidency over to the squad, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama holdovers. They hand him a script; he tries to read it; and they follow up with the details. He is the old “Star Trek’s” tottering John Gill.

The Left may hope their own nihilist agenda sort of works. When it inevitably does not, then Joe, the delivery man, is blamed: so much more quickly, then, will be Biden’s necessary exit. They kept their part of the bargain by getting the basement denizen elected. Now he keeps the deal by handing over the presidency. Biden’s utility had about a six-month shelf life.

Now ever so slowly the leaks, the West Wing backstabbing, the furrowed anchor brows, and the unnamed sources will gently ease him out with 25th Amendment worries (e.g., “Perhaps President Biden might find taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment of some value after all, for his own benefit, of course.”) Kamala Harris is not so inert as we are led to believe.

A cognitively challenged Biden then is pulled in every direction, by his own senility, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his neanderthal hatred of everything Trump was and did.

The problem for America is that theories one through five are not always mutually exclusive, but more likely force multipliers of the present insanity. At some point, some brave congressional representative or Senator will finally have to say to Biden, in the spirit of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

My Comment

It should also be noted that Biden governance follows the classical pattern for leftist autocracies.  The massive spending programs already enacted and proposed serve not only to greatly expand the federal bureaucracy but also to perversely make the population financially dependent on government largess.  Down the line such dependency ensures compliance with diktats constraining citizen’s rights and freedoms.  Trotsky explained how the Soviets got there by nationalizing the means of production.

How long will the “Free and Fair 2020 Election” Dam hold up under the pressure of election fraud reports?   John Solomon summarizes the numerous cracks appearing in his Just The News article Narrative of a perfect 2020 election eroding as Wisconsin becomes investigative ground zero.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Evidence grows of election mismanagement, illegal acts and some fraud in several states.

Cognitively impaired nursing home residents in Wisconsin and Michigan cynically exploited for votes. Election mismanagement in Atlanta. Unlawful election instructions in Wisconsin. And 50,000 questionable ballots in Arizona, plus several criminal cases for illegal ballot harvesting and inmate voting.

Eleven months after Donald Trump was ousted from office, the narrative that the 2020 election was clean and secure has frayed like a well-worn shoelace. The challenges of the COVID pandemic, the aggressive new tactics of voting activists and the desire of Democrats to make the collection and delivery of ballots by third parties legal in states where harvesting is expressly forbidden has muddied the establishment portrait and awakened the nation to the painful reality its election system — particularly in big urban areas — is far from perfection.

Nowhere has that story become more clear than the battleground state of Wisconsin, where a local sheriff on Thursday dramatically held a nationally televised news conference alleging he had found evidence of felony crimes involving ballots sent to nursing home residents.

Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said his investigators have secured evidence that eight out of 42 residents at a local nursing home had been recorded as casting absentee ballots that their families said was not possible because the residents didn’t possess the cognitive ability to vote.

The probe was prompted by one family who discovered their loved one had voted in the November 2020 election despite having died a month earlier after a long period of mental decline, authorities said.

Schmaling dramatically accused the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the state’s election bureaucracy, of creating the conditions for such voting by mailing absentee ballots to nursing home residents who didn’t request them and empowering nursing home staff to fill out ballots on behalf of the residents.

The “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered,” he said.

The nursing home scheme alleged by Schmaling was also found in neighboring Michigan, where Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel earlier this month announced three women were charged with voting fraud, including one who fraudulently filled out ballots in the names of nursing home residents without their permission.

But the nursing home case is far from the only concern that has rocked Wisconsin, where Joe Biden was certified the winner over Trump with a razor-thin margin of about 20,000 votes. The non-partisan Legislative Audit Bureau released a sweeping report last month that accused election officials of engaging in “inconsistent administration” of election laws, troublesome management of new drop boxes used to collect ballots during the pandemic, ineffective investigation of fraud complaints, and other problems.

While it did not offer evidence of systemic fraud, it flagged more than 30 problems as well as many more issues that lawmakers should resolve for future elections. The report prompted the GOP leader of the Wisconsin Senate to launch an investigation into the November election, augmenting a separate probe already authorized by the Wisconsin Assembly that is being led by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman.

And those developments follow a ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court that concluded state election officials wrongly allowed tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters to skip voter ID requirements and file absentee ballots by declaring their concerns about COVID made them “indefinitely confined.” While the court ruled the advice was illegal, it noted there was no penalty and said it was up to voters to decide if they had an infirmity or disability that made them confined. Lawmakers are now looking to change the weaknesses in that law.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) the former chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees elections, said the dizzying revelations coming from his own state were a clear sign that lawmakers have far more work ahead of them to improve election administration and ensure voters are treated more evenly.

“Following the LAB report, what Sheriff Schmaling has uncovered + disclosed might only be tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election,” Johnson tweeted. “The Legislature must be given the time, resources, and cooperation of election officials to conduct a complete investigation of allegations.”

Similarly, state officials in Georgia, where Trump lost by a slim margin, have found evidence that its major urban voting center of Fulton County had significant problems administering the November election, so much so that state officials have begun the process of taking the county’s election management into receivership, removing local control for the 2022 election and beyond.

That dramatic move came after Just the News unearthed a 29-page memo from a state observer that found officials in Futon County engaged in all sorts of misconduct and mistakes, including insecure transport of ballots, double scanning of ballots and possible invasions of voter privacy.

And earlier this month, two Fulton County workers were fired for allegedly shredding ballot applications in violation of state law. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger even asked the U.S. Justice Department to assist in the investigation.

And in nearby DeKalb County, Raffensperger has initiated a separate probe into whether ballots cast in “drop boxes” were properly handled and logged.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the Arizona Senate’s audit continues to be felt, as more than 50,000 ballots have been called into question and several matters referred to Attorney General Mark Brnovich for possible prosecution. Even before those referrals, Brnovich’s office has brought several criminal prosecutions, including prison inmates who illegally voted as well as some people accused of harvesting ballots from third parties.

The harvesting cases in Arizona as well as the nursing home cases in the Midwest are opening up a new line of inquiry that could drive the election integrity debate well into 2022. The emerging question: Is it possible that residents legally allowed to vote had their votes illegally gathered and delivered by third parties?

It’s a question several state officials told Just the News they have begun investigating, meaning the term “ballot harvesting” may become more familiar to Americans in the weeks and months ahead.

Meanwhile, the news media and state officials may have to grapple with a more difficulty reality: It doesn’t require widespread fraud for Americans to lose faith in the election system. Mismanagement, uneven application of the laws and plain old carelessness can sow deep distrust.