Bloomberg: It's Not Infrastructure; It's Reimagining the U.S. Economy - Bloomberg

The  always provocative Noah Smith from Bloomberg

It's Not Infrastructure; It's Reimagining the U.S. Economy

by Noah Smith

<p>Biden is aiming for transformation with his next legislative push that tackles social ills and climate change to fit the needs of the future</p>

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-29/it-s-not-infrastructure-it-s-reimagining-the-u-s-economy?sref=woWS9Szx

President Joe Biden's next major legislative initiative is called an "infrastructure" bill, but it's actually something bigger. It's about transforming the nation to better fit the needs of our future economy — in other words, industrial policy.

Usually when we think of infrastructure bills, we're talking about repairing all the old stuff: roads and bridges. This bill will definitely include that, but it will also build lots of new infrastructure : a modernized electrical grid, electric vehicle charging stations and public transit.

In addition, Biden wants to build lots of things not normally counted as infrastructure — housing to relieve the nationwide housing shortage, schools and other education facilities, various resources for Native American tribes, and so on. And he wants to retrofit many existing buildings and transportation systems to be more energy-efficient and to run on renewable energy.

And on top of all that, the bill is expected to contain provisions to alter the shape of the U.S. economy. That includes a big boost in research spending, free community college tuition, and massively increased spending on child care. The idea is to upgrade both the high-tech competitive parts of the economy while also boosting the labor-intensive industries that provide mass employment.

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In other words, Biden's second legislative effort will be far more transformative than his first. It amounts to a serious and sweeping redirection of the entire U.S. economy. There are many reasons Biden is choosing, rightly, to do this now, when his Democratic predecessors were so much more cautious and incremental. The competitive and military threat from China, the nation's demand for a burst of growth after the disaster of Covid-19, and the increasingly dire threat from climate change all figure into it. But the biggest reason is that the nation has come to a collective realization that the old industrial policy, fashioned in the late 1970s and 1980s, is no longer working.