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After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

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Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#61

Post by vagrantJin »

mrweasel wrote: post #18
CalRobert wrote: post #12

This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals. Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?

The US is huge, and people are already migrating to the cities (a bad move in the light of COVID). The remaining cities still need to be connected by roads, even if you’re closing down small communities. You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.

I dont have the data but it seems transportation is something that exponentially gets harder to solve the more resources you have.

Anecdotally, I live in a suburban area in a "developing" country. It was definitely not designed for people to live in - there are no small shops just a huge big chain store, barely any sidewalks and I havent seen any people just walking about. Every house seems to have about two cars. Outside the suburbs its the complete opposite. Roads are full of people milling about and kids playing cricket or soccer. Cars are second class citizens on the townships. First class citizens in the suburbs. Crazy.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#62

Post by op00to »

gruez wrote: post #41
op00to wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% support this. If you know anyone who has been affected by the callous and careless behavior of drunk drivers, ask them if they agree.

>If you know anyone who has been affected by the callous and careless behavior of drunk drivers, ask them if they agree. I bet if you asked 9/11 victims whether they want the PATRIOT act, they'd agree as well. That doesn't mean it's a good reason to support it, or that their feelings should be given more weight than anyone else's.

Wow, you just somehow denigrated both 9/11 victims and drunk driving victims while attempting to defend the right to drive drunk. Congratulations.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#63

Post by DaftDank »

bluejekyll wrote: post #44
dougmwne wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s probably a reductive take. This bill is massive, over 2000 pages. It has funding for all kinds of transportation, green, energy and digital infrastructure. Roads are a part of that because once they are built, they need to be maintained or else people will die. There are several examples of bridges and overpasses collapsing and leading to deaths and badly maintained road surface leads to fatal accidents as wel…

An area that I didn’t see talk about was investment in pedestrian and bicycle safety infrastructure. That’s generally a much smaller investment with significant gains in reducing car travel, to the GP’s point. I would have liked to see spending on bike and pedestrian safety projects as a percentage of any money spend on car infrastructure.

I live in a fairly rural, but affluent, part of Michigan now, and at one of the township board meetings, they were discussing a proposed bike lane. The reason they didn't want it? Only one person (on the board) really said anything at all, and his reasoning was that he imagined a scenario in which there would be some sort of biking event where lots of people would be biking the trail, and his driveway could somehow end up getting blocked. Keep in mind, this is a rural area where most properties sit on 5-10+ acres at least, and the driveways are very far apart generally.

It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I just got the impression that for whatever reason, they were deeply opposed to the idea of people being able to safely bike down country roads. After living in San Francisco and Indianapolis in the years before, it was definitely weird seeing people being opposed to bike paths, especially when it would not interfere with their country life almost at all. Maybe they thought it would start them down a path of changing their way of life? I don't know.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#64

Post by gruez »

op00to wrote: post #62
gruez wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you know anyone who has been affected by the callous and careless behavior of drunk drivers, ask them if they agree. I bet if you asked 9/11 victims whether they want the PATRIOT act, they'd agree as well. That doesn't mean it's a good reason to support it, or that their feelings should be given more weight than anyone else's.

Wow, you just somehow denigrated both 9/11 victims and drunk driving victims while attempting to defend the right to drive drunk. Congratulations.

>Wow, you just somehow denigrated both 9/11 victims and drunk driving victims

how? by pointing out that their opinions don't get an automatic free pass because they were victims?

>while attempting to defend the right to drive drunk. Congratulations.

Congratulations on generalizing everyone who's against such measures as "defend the right to drive drunk". That's exactly the same argument as surveillance supporters, who claim that if you're against surveillance you must be a terrorist/pedophile/criminal and/or support them.

You can be against drunk driving, but be skeptical or against this specific implementation of anti-drunk driving measures. As it stands right now, you haven't provided any justification for why it's warranted and is worth the costs, aside from "ask [drunk driving victims] if they agree".

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#65

Post by Brian_K_White »

nerdponx wrote: post #38
_jal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline price is an artifact of congressional accounting. It is an estimate of the 10-year cost. The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.

$100bn/year is still an astronomical amount of money.

It's $300 per person per year.

Even factoring that I will have to cover for several other people who can't pay, all I say is, well we have an astronomical amount of infrastructure and it's been neglected for decades, and, as long as I get something for it.

I don't care that it's 100bn, that was going to be collected and spent on something regardless. I care far more about what it's spent on.

Maybe it will add incentive down the road to close the loopholes on the Bezos's of the world a little.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#66

Post by pavlov »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #54

Ha! Just as I expected, a bill that mostly builds infrastructure that corporations/Wall Street wanted, not much for the slave class (also known as the “middle class”). As Warren Buffet once said “there has been class warfare and my class won.” Biden should man-up and issue executive orders to satisfy at least a few of his campaign promises to the non-elite class.

You have to be more specific and explain why the middle class slaves don’t benefit from power lines, airports, fixed water pipes, flood protections etc.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#67

Post by ralfn »

nerdponx wrote: post #38
_jal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline price is an artifact of congressional accounting. It is an estimate of the 10-year cost. The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.

$100bn/year is still an astronomical amount of money.

For a person: yes.

For 330 million people: no.

To compare: the US occupation of Afghanistan cost about this much per year, but that budget has been freed up.

I live in Europe and I see the same lack of basic understanding of finance. People claim the EU costs a lot of money. And it does. But not per person. Not at all.

And any reporter that talks about macro economic numbers like this without normalizing it per capita is either an idiot or is intentionally manipulating.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#68

Post by mark_l_watson »

pavlov wrote: post #66
mark_l_watson wrote: post #54

Ha! Just as I expected, a bill that mostly builds infrastructure that corporations/Wall Street wanted, not much for the slave class (also known as the “middle class”). As Warren Buffet once said “there has been class warfare and my class won.” Biden should man-up and issue executive orders to satisfy at least a few of his campaign promises to the non-elite class.

You have to be more specific and explain why the middle class slaves don’t benefit from power lines, airports, fixed water pipes, flood protections etc.

We benefit somewhat by increased employment but I believe that the reconciliation bill had the good stuff for non-elites, not this bill.

It is an open question whether massive spending is appropriate right now.

Re: After months of delay, the House passes infrastructure bill

#69

Post by s1artibartfast »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #65
nerdponx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100bn/year is still an astronomical amount of money.

It's $300 per person per year. Even factoring that I will have to cover for several other people who can't pay, all I say is, well we have an astronomical amount of infrastructure and it's been neglected for decades, and, as long as I get something for it. I don't care that it's 100bn, that was going to be collected and spent on something regardless. I care far more about what it's spent on. Maybe it will add incenti…

I like your optimism that it was going to be covered anyways and that you'll get something out of it
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