‘Infrastructure’ needs redefining

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Here’s a thought or two about “infrastructure.”

If we’re going to talk about it, let us broaden its scope beyond simply roads, bridges, highways, airports, seaports and rail lines.

Let’s also talk about energy production, not to mention the development of new sources of energy and Internet research to broaden our power infrastructure.

President Biden is trying to sell a $2.2 trillion infrastructure package that he is calling a “jobs bill.” He intends for it to produce millions of jobs over the next several years. Biden calls it a “generational” approach to improving our nation’s infrastructure.

To no one’s surprise, he is getting hammered from both political extremes. Republicans dislike the bill because it raises corporate taxes to help pay for it. Progressive Democrats don’t like it because it doesn’t go far enough; they want to spend even more than what the president is proposing.

Both extremes are all wet. They are mistaken.

Joe Biden says no one who earns less than $400,000 a year will see a tax increase. That doesn’t satisfy the GOP caucus in Congress, which rammed through a huge corporate tax cut during the first year of the Trump administration. What they never tell us is that President Biden’s proposed corporate tax rate — 28 percent — is still less than what it was before the Donald Trump tax cut took effect. Fiddlesticks!

On the other side, the far lefties among the Democrat want to spend $10 trillion. That’s 10 trillion bucks, man! Where in the world are they planning to come up with the revenue to pay for that kind of price tag? If they intend to tax middle-income Americans as well as the richest of us, well, good luck with that one.

I am growing weary of hearing Republicans say that too little of the president’s plan deals with “infrastructure.” I differ with them on that complaint. If you factor in all the jobs created by developing clean energy and, oh yes, broadband Internet capability then the infrastructure package seems about right.

Republicans remain too wedded to an outdated notion of what comprises “infrastructure.” I am willing to redefine the term to fit a growing and changing 21st-century world.