 let's jump into this. So Biden proposed his infrastructure program today, put it out. Of course it's meaningless, right? Because presidents don't dictate legislation. It goes to Congress, Congress smiles it over, changes it, it might pass the House, it might pass the Senate, it will be very, very different when this is all over than what Biden proposed. I mean, what the proposal today is basically an outline, a starting point, but it usually has very little to do with the final bill. The ultimately bills are written by Congress and not by the president. The president is shapes the agenda, see definitely, but if Congress wants to bury the infrastructure bill, they will. But we have, thanks to Donald Trump, we have a House that is democratic, a Senate that's democratic, and a president that's democratic. So they're likely to get what they want. Interestingly enough, infrastructure was a bipartisan issue. It was Trump who in 16 and throughout his administration talked about wanting to pass a big infrastructure bill. He talked about $2 to $3 trillion. Never got it done, but that is, you know, part of the course for the Trump administration. They've actually got it done. But a lot of talking about infrastructure bills, it looks like Biden will actually pass the bill that Trump wanted. We'll talk about this bill and how much of it is actual infrastructure and so on. Okay, let's start with a quick overview of the state of American infrastructure because, you know, the way people are talking, it's like the infrastructure in the United States is crumbling, is decaying, we're all about to drop into kind of Middle Ages infrastructure. And indeed, if you go to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, I could have been a member of that. I don't know how many of you know, but I am a civil engineer in a, in a earlier life, long, long time ago. I was a construction manager. So I was, my undergraduate is in civil engineering. Anyway, the American Society of Civil Engineering grades the U.S. infrastructure as a D plus, D plus. So just a little above F. Now, I have no idea what the standards of the American Society of Civil Engineering are, what their standards are for determining the state of American infrastructure. I don't know what a D plus means. I don't know what any of that means. It's, it strikes me somewhat arbitrary. And it's not clear who is responsible, even in our current system, for infrastructure. I think most infrastructure is the responsibility of state government. And yet this infrastructure bill is a federal bill. It's the federal government taking on responsibilities of the entire United States infrastructure, most of which is really the responsibility of the States. So the whole thing is unclear. According to the American Society of Civil Engineering, in order to bring our infrastructure up to, I guess an A, I don't know, up to a good grade, you would have to invest $4.5 trillion by 2025, $4.5 trillion. Remember, this bill is $2 trillion. And as we'll discuss in a few minutes, yeah, it's not $2 trillion for infrastructure. It's, it's a little bit of infrastructure. It's some infrastructure. And a lot of redistribution of wealth and welfare and stuff like that, couched as in the pretense of infrastructure. Because who's against infrastructure? Don't we all love infrastructure? All right, so the American Society of Civil Engineers is divided American infrastructure into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven categories, seven categories. We're going to go over those categories quickly. The first category is real network. Now, what's stunning about the real network is that the real network primarily is private. It's private. And private companies invest heavily in real infrastructure in order to keep it running, because why, why would they want to, why would they invest in real infrastructure? I mean, those greedy capitalists don't, don't they want the real infrastructure to deteriorate and to just fall apart? Well, it turns out that no, it turns out that that's how they make their money. They make their money off of the real infrastructure. So they need to keep it going, stay invest heavily in it. Indeed, in 2015, private companies invested $27.1 billion in real infrastructure. Now, in spite of that, parts of the real infrastructure are old, part of it are public, like Amtrak, right? Amtrak is mostly public. And there they're running huge deficits and much billions of dollars, like 33.3 by some estimates are needed in order to invest in Amtrak's real infrastructure to bring it up at the snuff. But, but that's the public part of the real industry. So what's interesting is, what's interesting is that of the grades of the various infrastructure projects, guess what infrastructure gets the best grade? What gets the best grade? Well, the rail network does. Why? Because the rail network is the one form of infrastructure in the United States, as they define infrastructure, that is privately run, privately funded, for profit. And it actually says in the summary slide of this presentation about American infrastructure, it says that the rail network gets a greater B, a B, and it says the content is due to private freight rail industry owning a large amount of the rail infrastructure. The rail network is constantly being upgraded and repaired. Who would have thought? I mean, it goes against everything we are taught, everything we believe in. I don't get this. You mean private enterprise does better in investing long term, in investing in infrastructure? I thought, oh no, no, I thought only government could do that because the private sector would neglect the infrastructure, doesn't think long term. They're just concerned, we were told, about quarterly earnings and you don't get any money, quarterly earnings by investing in infrastructure, that's a long term investment. And private individuals don't do that, private enterprise doesn't do that, they don't invest long term. The fact is, the only one of these infrastructure projects, you know, industries that actually gets a grade, I think above a D, is the rail network because it's private. Everything else is run by the government, therefore everything else is lousy. The worst part of the rail infrastructure, what do you think the worst part of the rail infrastructure is? It's the passenger rail, much of which is Amtrak, which is subsidized by the government. So if everything, everything was private, we might get a grade of A, we might get a grade of A. Just some fun facts about railroads, US rail network covers 140,000 miles of train tracks, 140,000 miles, none of those by the way, high speed rail, train accidents, this is a good one, train accidents have gone down almost 79% from 1980. So over the last 40 years, train accidents have gone down almost 79%. That's pretty impressive. All right, anybody know what state has the most derailments, the most accidents, train accidents? Taxes, states with no derailments, DC, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey. I don't know what to make of that, but that's the data I have in front of me. All right, second source of infrastructure that needs investment in, I guess, bridges. It is said that 38% of all US bridges have identified repair needs, although none of them or very few of them are about to collapse in the middle of Russia. District of Columbia has only nine structurally deficient bridges, the least amount of any state, although of course, District of Columbia is not a state. Percentage-wise, only 1.6% of Nevada's bridges are structurally deficient, the lowest percentage of any state. Anybody want to know what is the state with the most structural defects, deficiencies? It's Iowa, so if you're driving in Iowa, don't go on the bridges. 4,675 bridges in Iowa have structural deficiencies. Rhode Island has the highest percentage, 25% of the bridges are structurally deficient. So bridges in the United States get a score of C plus, C plus, and 38% of the US bridges need to be repaired. This is going to cost $171 billion to repair all the bridges. This is pretty cheap, right? $171 billion. That's like, I mean, if you have, if you, or if you are worth a million dollars, $171 billion is only 171,000 times your net worth, 171,000 times. 47,000 structurally deficient bridges, 235,000 bridges that need some repair replacement. There's 620,000 bridges in the US. So we get a C plus on bridges. I mean, bridges strike me historically, not private, but they strike me as something the state should take care of. Why aren't the states taking care of their bridges? Why does the federal government have to bail out bridge deficiencies? Why does, why the taxpayers in Nevada who seem to take care of their bridges pretty well, why are they having to subsidize Rhode Island where the bridges suck, or Iowa where the bridges suck even more? Why are we federalizing something that should be private but as second best could be local, could be, I know privatizing bridges, that's kind of, that's kind of shocking and far removed, but in radical, but what about the state's doing it like they've always done it? No, no, no. We need, everything needs to be federalized now. We don't trust anybody. We have to federalize everything. That's bridges. How many of you want to go over all the different infrastructure this way? Energy, ooh, energy, energy gets a greater D plus. You saw that in Texas, right? And we need to repair and upgrade all the, all the existing infrastructure. Again, we saw that with, we saw that with taxes. But again, isn't energy private? Now it's heavily regulated. Much of it is public utilities, heavily, heavily regulated, basically arms of the government. Much of the need to upgrade the infrastructure and energy is distribution lines, transmissions and distribution lines, which have, most of which have exceeded their 50-year life expectancy. While some of that is private, all of it is heavily regulated, controlled by the states. Of course, the solution to upgrading energy infrastructure is to do what? What's the solution to upgrading infrastructure of energy? It's to privatize. It's to completely get the government out of the business. It's to return to the days where everything, the lines, the production, the distribution was competitive and private. It didn't have any government protection. Didn't get any government subsidies. Didn't get any government anything. So you want to solve the energy and let solar, wind, whatever compete. Of course, the solution there is let nuclear compete. Now that would be a revolution. That would be a real revolution. All right, wastewater. Wastewater treated plants. They're 14,748,000 wastewater treatment plants. And of course, crucial to cleaning the water and everything. According to the associated general contractors of America, there's a group that doesn't have an interest in this. They're completely objective. They won't see a dime of this infrastructure spending, right? According to the associated general contractors of America, four to $600 billion dollars are needed over the next 20 years for safe drinking water and wastewater treatment infrastructure. The EPA on the other hand, a government regulator estimates that only 271 billion is needed over the next 25 years. So I wonder why the general contractors of America are inflating their numbers. You think it's because they want to work? You think this is a consequence of cronyism in any way? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe. Oh, Jacob wants the link. Let me see if I can get you the link. I'll post the link on the chat. I think this is it. Yeah, here's the link. The link on the chat to the article that I am reading from that has all these stats, right? BigWrents.com, right? The state of U.S. infrastructure. And it's citing the American Society of Civil Engineering. It's citing these different sources for this stuff. So wastewater contractors think a lot needs to be invested. EPA, not so much. Why isn't this privatized? Why don't we privatize water? I mean desalination, you can think of a lot of things. Wastewater could be, I mean, all of this could be privatized. Do you know that we have 800,000 miles of sewage pipes in the United States? 140,000 miles of train tracks, 800,000 miles of sewage pipes. So yeah, we're getting to need a lot of money for all this wastewater. And Biden have us covered. Don't worry. Don't worry. The water's going to be drinking is clean because Biden has you covered. He's got money associated with this. Aviation. Aviation. All right, here the grade is D. D. So it's better. It's worse than D plus. It's worse than wastewater. How, you know, we have congestion. We don't have enough airports. Airports are too small. According to this, we need $157 billion is needed to upgrade and repair everything. You know, I fly a lot, a lot, by anybody's standards and need I being accused by a recent article, I think in The Guardian, of being one of the global elites responsible for almost all of the carbon emissions from airplanes, it's people, it's me and people like me, right? Who are responsible for the destruction of the planet because we fly so much. And we have 3,332 airports in the United States. Yeah, I mean, most of them are not great. Some of them are nice. LaGuardia, which is a which was a dumpier airport, a real horrible airport in New York, and particularly the American Airlines terminal has been recently upgraded significantly. I haven't seen the new terminal, but it was being built in 2019, when I was last there, and should be beautiful by now, right? JFK, parts of JFK have been improved significantly. A lot of investment going in at airports. Again, it seems to me that this is a profit center that all you have to do is privatize the airports. I know that the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico is owned by a private company. I think a Mexican private company. But why can't the airport to be private? Some of them are. And there's a strong incentive to make them better. And you can see constant, I see constant improvement at airports, better restaurants, better facilities, more cleanliness is in an increase. Yeah, just just more comfort, more comfort at airports. It's slow. But yeah, I mean, our airport infrastructure is old. It's not like China that just recently built all its airports. It didn't have any before. And now suddenly it's built them all. And as a consequence of that, it's, it's, you know, it's really got a, I mean, you can't really compare airports in the United States with airports in China. I mean, the airports in China are gorgeous, just stunning architecture, and just amazingly clean and big and comfortable and airy and amazing architecture, lots of light. Anyway, another 157 billion to repair airports. Again, I think all of that would happen if you privatized it, it would take care of it. Roads. Roads is a biggie. Roads have D, great of D. Now, I have to tell you, I've driven in a lot of states in the United States. I've driven all over the country. And I've driven in Puerto Rico. And let me tell you, roads in the United States are pristine. They're magnificent. They're outstanding by the standards of Puerto Rico. So I don't know why people are complaining. But according to this report, we need 420 billion dollars to repair all the roads. Again, why is this not city and states doing it? Put aside the idea of privatizing the roads, which again, is pretty radical. What about city-states doing this? What about the old idea of use taxes? If you're going to spend taxpayer money on roads, then do it on the basis of use. I think of all the taxes among the least offensive in my mind. If it's used for road repair is a gasoline tax. I think tolls on bridges are the way to fix bridges. So if you use it, you should be paying like it would be in a private market. You should be paying for fixing those roads, the maintaining of those roads. Now, how would you walk in a private market in a private market? And I know the libertarians are going to freak out now, but in a private market, you'd put a GPS tracker on your car. A private entity would track what roads you drove on, and they would bill you accordingly. And they would divvy up the money to the different road owners based on the different rates that the toll related to. Now, you could do that even if the municipality owned the roads. Why couldn't you put a GPS? Now, you have to run it through a private company so the government didn't have the data, but the private company would basically bill you and transfer the money, minus a fee, to the local government, and then you would be paying for roads based on usage rather than just arbitrarily based on tax money. And again, people who live in states that have good roads, like Georgia, Georgia only 4% of public roads are in poor condition versus Washington DC, or Puerto Rico, where 93% of public roads are in poor condition. I think in Puerto Rico, it's 100% of roads. Drinking water systems, another D. Oh, drinking water systems. Whoa. So drinking water systems to fix them, maintain them, expand them, a trillion dollars, according to this report, a trillion, 240,000 water mains break a year. Why can't water companies fix that? Why can't localities fix that? Anybody know who is the worst drinking water in the country? It's not Flint, Michigan. It's not Flint. It's Fresno, California. The best drinking water is in Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa. And I don't drive on the bridges in Iowa, but it's okay to drink the water. All right. Iowa has the best drinking water, according to this. All right. I think we covered all the infrastructure. D for water, D for roads, D for aviation, D plus for wastewater, D plus for energy, and a C plus for bridges, and a B for rail. And of course, all this could be privatized and the government wouldn't have to do anything. And my guess is everything would get a B plus to an A plus rating because of rail was completely private. Rail would have a A rating and you could have that for everything. All right. So that's the state, according to one website, one study, one report of American infrastructure. So what is our president in his immense wisdom going to do about this? Well, he is going to spend two trillion dollars, now two trillion dollars is a lot of money. If the fixing all the infrastructure in the United States requires four and a half trillion dollars by 2025. Two trillion is half of that. And the rest could be done by the states and we would have amazing infrastructure in the United States. This is amazing. Well, it turns out that this two trillion dollar infrastructure bill isn't really about infrastructure, or at least a big chunks of it are not a little about infrastructure. All right. So 621 billion are devoted to transportation infrastructure, bridges, roads, public transit, ports, airports, electric vehicle development. Whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute. How do we get to that? Electric vehicle development? I thought that was done by Tesla and GM and BMW and companies like that. What is the federal government going to invest in electric vehicle development? So you can already see the 621 billion dollars, it's not really going to go to fix the railroads and the bridges and the roads and the public. I mean, some of it will go to that. But some of this is actually going to go to electric vehicle development, subsidies to all kinds of electric vehicle makers, I assume. Maybe we can have the 21st Century Motor Company, that's an Atlas Shrug reference, and we can have that government own it. We can skip over all the rest and just have to government own it and see how that does. Tell with Tesla. More than that, a bunch of this money is going to go to building an infrastructure of electric charging stations all over the country, so that if you buy an electric car, you can actually charge it when you drive around. Because we know that the only reason we have gas stations is because the government built the gas stations, because that's how we got gas stations. If we didn't have gas stations, if the government didn't build gas stations, who would ever build a gas station? I mean, we need the government to build this kind of infrastructure. I mean, this is insanity. The gas station infrastructure was built by private companies making money off of gas because cars use gas. As electric cars get more popular, those gas stations will include charging stations for electric cars and an electric car charging infrastructure will be built around the country. Maybe Tesla can build charging stations. Ed writes in the chat, Tesla is building a plant in China to make 10,000 charging stations a year. Tesla is always ahead of the curve. Elon Musk knows that the federal government is going to be buying huge quantities of charging stations, and he is building them in China so he can sell them to the Biden administration and make a fortune, which is how we build Tesla through government subsidies and government tax breaks and government redistribution. And he's always ahead of the curve in terms of knowing what the government's going to do in developing a technology to address it. I mean, Tesla is opening up stations now, but why would they continue opening up stations when the competition is government is going to build them or government is going to fund them? I guess as Tesla will get a subsidy for every gas, for every charging station they open up. So $621 billion, I don't know how it's broken up, but yeah, Bridges wrote, we'll get some of it. Public transit, you know what, they're going to build those high-speed reels between nowhere and nowhere in California. Ports, airports, okay, electric vehicle development, God. Okay, that's $621 billion. We still have $1.4 trillion to go. Hold on, guys. Don't get too excited. Now, here's a really important infrastructure project that $400 billion are going to go towards. $400 billion. $400 billion to care for elderly and disabled Americans. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. How is that infrastructure? I mean, it's welfare. It's wealth distribution. But how is an infrastructure? Well, it's not. It's not. The $400 billion is a way to expand welfare by wrapping it around an infrastructure bill that might actually get Republican support because, remember, Republicans were very, very big into infrastructure. Ed says he's 72 and he's elderly. And you're not infrastructure, Ed. I hate to break this to you, but you're not infrastructure. And yet, $400 billion are going to be dedicated to you. Thank you, Alan. Appreciate that. It's not my birthday yet, but Super Chat is good whether it's birthday or not. It's always a good time to celebrate through Super Chat. Yes, I remind you to use Super Chat to support the show. It's a trade, value for value. If you get value from what I do here, trade with me by supporting the show. You can change your name, Ed, but you cannot get younger. All right. So you can see $400 billion already is not infrastructure. Okay, $300 billion into improving drinking water infrastructure, expanding broadband access and upgrading electric grid. Notice how these things are snuck in, expanding broadband. Wait a minute. Isn't Elon Musk already doing that? Aren't we putting out into orbit tens of thousands of satellites that are going to provide broadband across the entire globe? Never mind just a rural America. Private Enterprise is doing this. It's engaged in it. Why does the government need to get involved? Again, crowd out private funding, crowd out innovation. Man, you guys don't know me at all. I mean, one guy's buying me whiskey and the other one's got me drinking malt something. I don't even know what that is. I'm a water and coffee guy, red wine. It's it. All you can do is red wine. They're talking about birthday gifts. I shouldn't be talking to the chat. People who listen to the podcast are distracted by it. So I really shouldn't be doing it. All right. So $300 billion drinking water, okay, qualifies, broadband and upgrading electric grow. Put more than $300 billion into building and retrofitting affordable housing, along with constructing and upgrading schools. Whoa. I guess that's infrastructure. No. It's not roads. It's not bridges. It's not airports. It's not rail. It's not drinking water. Affordable housing, more welfare. And here's a good one. Here is a good one. More than 25% of the entire infrastructure bill. Now, Donald Trump would be proud of this. More than 25% of the infrastructure bill, $580 billion is going to go into American manufacturing. I take it as subsidies for American manufacturing. R&D, research and development because, God, our businesses don't do enough R&D and job training efforts. Because we've got to build those manufacturing jobs up in America. We've got to bring more manufacturing back. We've got to instill an American first attitude and American name. Oh, wait a minute. No, this is Biden, not Trump. I was confused there for a minute. If you want to ask me a question, Super Chat is available. You can use $2. That's all it would cost to ask a question to Super Chat. But I'm trying not to answer questions that are not Super Chat questions. $580 billion to subsidize manufacturing in the United States. When our manufacturing sector is doing great, we manufacture more than we've ever manufactured with a lot fewer people, a lot fewer people. But it's not an infrastructure bill. There's some infrastructure here. Maybe half, probably a little less than half is the kind of stuff we think of as infrastructure. The rest are subsidies, redistribution of wealth, welfare, and all wrapped up with the idea that we're telling Americans, look, we're investing in your infrastructure. And it's an investment, by the way, this is the government investing they're telling us. This brings about a real return on your money. How are we going to fund this $2 trillion? Don't worry, Biden has a plan. And of course, the plan is not to cut spending somewhere else. That would never work. That would never be appropriate. Even Republicans don't believe in that. No, the proposal is to raise taxes. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who like it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up. 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