A Bridge Too Far, a Child Unworthy

 

Perhaps, I should not be surprised by a fundamental failure of Republicans – who are supposed to encourage and understand business – to comprehend the difference between an investment (which is intended to generate a rate of return, like buying stock) and an expense (a simple cost, which may be necessary or optional, but it does not generate an economic return). We have a massive supply chain issue today, lots of jobs going begging, but the rise in prices has all but eliminated the ability of so many child caretakers, statistically far and away mostly mothers, to move back into the work force. Instead, we lose their productivity and rely more heavily on imports, a double whammy in our employment picture. Not to mention the lost tax revenue of more employed workers and the rise in governmental benefits that have to be paid out.

It’s called infrastructure: hardscape, repair, upgrades and expansion plus social infrastructure to enable the workforce to build and maintain productivity. Money in. Productivity up. Revenue to workers, the business they buy from and the resultant expansion of the tax base to the government. Easy to understand. But if you listen to Republicans opposing the expansion of the $1.75 next stage Build Back Better bill, you’d think they flunked Econ 101, if they even took that course or remember its lessons. Prudent investing IS NOT INFLATIONARY. Letting assets go to waste and keeping workers out of the work force – that if we kick the can down the road and ignore the issues, it will be someone else’s problem – makes absolutely no economic sense. It always costs more in the long run.

With prices soaring, we need workers back in the labor pool fast. Without the passage of President Joe Biden’s next stage $1.75 trillion Build Back Better economic plan, the monthly pandemic-driven federal childcare payments have now expired; the child tax credit has reverted to its much smaller pre-pandemic form. That has impacted 35 million families and 65 million American children. Too many parents with young children are simply staying home, because one of the most expensive costs for them today is having someone or somewhere safely to look after their children while their parents are at work. That monthly payment according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, had covered roughly half of Black and Latino children and half of those who live in rural areas. And women are nearly three times more likely than men to remain home for the kids.

What makes this so much worse is that many of those childcare workers and owners are themselves in one of the lowest paying jobs in the nation. According to the December 16th NPR.org, “95 percent of child care owners and workers are women, and 40 percent of them are women of color. [D]espite the high cost of care, the average childcare worker earns about $24,000 per year — less than many janitors and baristas…

“Other countries subsidize child care, but the U.S. market, while heavily regulated, is largely private — which makes the industry particularly vulnerable. President Biden's Build Back Better plan outlines a path toward more affordable child care.” In some states, the cost of childcare exceeds the cost of a college education (e.g., Massachusetts), sometimes absorbing half or more of a worker’s income. 

But the Republican position on childcare is typified by Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson who said it's not "society's responsibility" to "take care of other people's children." So, millions of women are staying home to care for their children as necessary supply chain jobs go begging, helping to fuel inflation to record levels. We’re all paying for this decision. We could expand early education, ultimately creating better workers who do better in school plus expanding government support that our labor force desperately needs. But we don’t.

It's kind of the same lackadaisical approach we have applied to hard infrastructure over the years. An overpass or bridge collapse stirs some legislators to action, but too soon, that notion fades into the woodwork, particularly as red state legislators and members of Congress subsidize billionaires with lower corporate tax rates and a total aversion to taxing wealth instead of just income. Like that 50-year-old bridge in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area (pictured above), deemed “structurally deficient” for the past decade, that collapsed on January 28th injuring 12.

The infrastructure bill that did pass Congress, which includes $27 billion “to rebuild crumbling roads and bridges across the nation, $1.6 billion of which will go to Pennsylvania. It remains unclear exactly which bridges will be on the receiving end of these funds, but according to the report, it will take closer to $260 billion to fix every single bridge that needs repairing in the U.S…

“American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), a trade association advocating for more investment in transportation infrastructure. The ARTBA estimated that a whopping 224,000 bridges in the U.S. need to be repaired: over 43,000 are classified as ‘structurally deficient’ or in ‘poor condition,’ and 78,800 need to be entirely replaced. The sheer magnitude of those numbers can be hard to put into perspective, but if you were to place all bridges end-to-end, the report suggests it would be long enough to crisscross the country from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine—and back again.

“Many of the bridges listed in the report have needed maintenance for years. ‘About 90% of the bridges that are classified as ‘poor condition’ were [also] structurally deficient last year,’ says Alison Black, the ARTBA’s chief economist and author of the report.” What we’ve allocated is a drop in the bucket. 

When it comes to transportation and utility infrastructure, for example, the US ranks 13th on expenditures; economic giant China blows away the American efforts in this arena, which are well below half of what China spends (both in hard dollars and in percentage of GDP). Want to make America great again, well the Republicans just don’t seem to understand how to do that.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our state and federal governments have become “reactive” to disasters and dire necessities… amplifying costs when things inevitably go wrong… when smart investments in “preventative” measures would save us trillions of dollars in the long run.