Planes, Trains & Automobiles

The war on mobility has far more sinister motives than just making Holiday travel miserable.

Never before has so much ‘infrastructure’ been funded and so little built.

Unless, that is, you label Pete Buttegieg’s ‘paternity’ leave as ‘human infrastructure.’ Which, by the way, is exactly what the Biden administration did with its trillion dollar infrastructure boondoggle in 2021.

For those of you caught in another hours-long traffic jam on a crumbling highway (or worse, stuck at the airport), that may not be much consolation.

Even the liberal Brookings Institution admits just a third of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) went toward highways, roads and bridges.¹ As a result, the Penn Wharton Budget Model said the bill “would have no significant effect on GDP by end of the budget window (2031) or in the long run (2050).”²

Real infrastructure spending, however, increases economic growth by increasing productivity (think shorter commutes). Moreover, as I explained in Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press, everyone who benefits from it should have skin in the game.

Gas taxes from auto users should not be subsidizing wealthy electric vehicles, something the redoubtable Mr. [Elon] Musk himself made clear when he blasted the Biden infrastructure bill: “Tesla has made roughly two-thirds of all the electric cars in the United States. I’m not sure most people are aware of that,” said the outspoken entrepreneur, “so Tesla’s made basically twice as many electric vehicles as the rest of [the] industry combined. And we don’t need the $7,500 tax credit. I would say honestly, I would just can this whole bill. Don’t pass it. That’s my recommendation.”

Not only did the Biden administration pass it, but they massively sweetened the tax credit for ‘qualifying’ (Teslas are out) EVs under the Inflation Reduction Act.³ This is a subsidy going toward wealthy owners of vehicles who produce no gas tax revenue for the dwindling Highway Trust Fund (HTF) that builds the roads EVs drive on.

Nevertheless, EVs continue to pile up on dealer lots.⁴

Upwards of 25 percent of trust fund spending is diverted to non-highway projects, the worst offender being the Mass Transit Account that builds expensive, ineffective—and now dangerous—urban rail projects.⁵ The ‘infrastructure’ bill continued to prop-up transit, but so did COVID relief legislation once the politicians saw what was happening to ridership after they locked down the labor force.⁶

Here too, the proverbial free-ride is evident as the few remaining users of these shiny new projects pay only a fraction of their billion dollar price tags. Yet they’re still getting their Amazon deliveries via roads and bridges financed by automobile drivers who drove a record 276 billion miles in September.⁷