Why do Republicans really oppose infrastructure spending?

[Hotspring 44]

Why do Republicans really oppose infrastructure spending?

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/15/1383149/-Why-do-Republicans-really-oppose-infrastructure-spending?



As the Amtrak derailment showed (again), the refusal to spend on infrastructure literally kills.Also, infrastructure spending: (i) is necessary and unavoidable (failure to timely spend on infrastructure increases the deficit in real terms), (ii) improves the gross domestic product and competitiveness, and (iii) is an obvious source for increased employment, particularly in currently hard hit segments. Moreover, infrastructure spending remains unambiguously popular. Indeed, infrastructure spending historically has had bipartisan support.

So, why are modern Republicans ideologically opposed to infrastructure spending today? For example:

In 2012, House Republicans introduced a transportation bill (including cuts in Amtrak subsidies and increases in truck-weight limits) that Ray LaHood, secretary of transportation during Obama’s first term, called “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.” LaHood himself had been a seven-term Republican congressman from Illinois before he agreed to serve in Obama’s cabinet.

The most accepted (or easily reported) explanation is that today's Republican party is dominated by Southern states, the center of heavy infrastructure (and costs) is located in the Northeast, and Republicans refuse to spend on states that don't vote Republican. There is truth to this explanation and, frankly, it is not properly reported as part of the wider partisan scandal that it is. For example, although federal disaster relief is uniformly passed in the wake of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc., the Hurricane Sandy relief bill was passed only when (as one of a few instances) the "Boehner Rule" was lifted to allow a bill to pass with largely Democratic votes. Why? Because only 70 House Republicans could be found who were willing to vote for federal emergency hurricane relief if the affected area was the the East Coast. Nice.

While as egregious as that geographic partisanship is, there are also at least four other fundamental reasons that explain the new Republican refusal to invest in infrastructure - all of which are largely undiscussed in general reporting.

1. Starve the Beast: While Republicans continue to refuse to raise revenue necessary to fund infrastructure spending (traditional Starve the Beast), the latest application - Starve the Beast 2.0 - looks to hold hostage any and all necessary spending for cuts to other, unfavored, government spending. In that sense, you have to understand the crucial (even threatening) need for infrastructure spending as identical to the "debt ceiling." For Republicans, the hundreds of billions to trillions of unmet infrastructure spending represents a massive, annual golden opportunity to extort draconian cuts to social, regulatory, non-defense spending. That is why Republicans also reject deficit-financing for infrastructure spending (at historically low interest rates) or alternative proposals like a private-public infrastructure bank. The goal here is not to invest in the country, but to seize upon any vulnerability to "drown the government in a bathtub."

This is plainly evident, btw. When President Obama proposed increased infrastructure spending in 2011 Republicans opposed it with a plan that would have "paid for the spending with a $40 billion cut in unspent funding for other domestic programs . . . and would block recent clean air rules and make it harder for the administration to issue new rules." In 2014, Eric Cantor explained that "Congress should not be adding new money, but instead streamlining the process for getting current resources to state and local governments." In 2015, Republicans opposed Democrats' proposed additional infrastructure spending by proposing instead to create a "deficit neutral reserve fund," that didn't identify the amount of such fund, or how - or whether - it would be funded. Just yesterday I saw Paul Ryan flatly reject any increased spending for infrastructure, regardless of the fatal Amtrack crash.

2. Privatizing the nation's infrastructure: This is the big kahuna that the press generally feels uncomfortable reporting. Republicans - at the behest of their mega-bank/private equity patrons - really, deeply want to privatize the nation's infrastructure and turn such public resources into privately owned, profit centers. More than anything else, this privatization fetish explains Republicans' efforts to gut and discredit public infrastructure, and it runs the gamut from disastrous instances of privatizing private parking meters to plans to privatize the federal highway system.

Indeed, if you listen to Republican proposals for "infrastructure reform," what you hear is: privatization and a longing for private tolls, tolls, tolls. As the Cato Institute explained in Senate testimony, now is the time to go back in time:

Continues here.