 Infrastructure bill, $1.2 trillion, it's interesting, some of the media is reporting it as $550 billion, $1.2 trillion, about $550 billion in new spending, so the rest is kind of reallocating and shuffling things around. It was supposed to be revenue neutral, so initially Biden had proposed increasing corporate tax, but he couldn't get enough support around that, he couldn't get Republicans to vote for it. So he did away with that, instead they are, this is what they're doing basically. They're basically pretending that it's revenue neutral. That's it. It's just, they basically are fantasizing. They're creating an alternative universe in which it's revenue neutral, and they're moving ahead with it, and Republicans are fine with that because Republicans don't really care about deficits. You know, so it's just pretence. A big part of the way they're pretending is like they're saying, hmm, there's a bunch of money from COVID stimulus that hasn't been used. We'll use it for this, but wait a minute. The COVID stimulus was not revenue neutral. It was deficit enhancing. And they have a bunch of other things like that. Oh, we'll get to the crypto stuff in a minute, but the crypto stuff is scary and useless and stupid. Anyway, let's talk about what's in this thing. We've got $110 billion for roads, bridges and major infrastructure projects. It's going to be interesting to see how many of those bridges go to nowhere. You remember the bridge to nowhere? Last time we built a lot of bridges, there was a bridge to nowhere. That was, I think, in Obama's stimulus package. Roads to, I don't know, do you really think this money is going to go to, like, building a tunnel between, I don't know, Orange County and LA so we can actually travel or actually be used to build roads that people use? I doubt it. A lot of roads to nowhere or roads to somewhere that nobody wants to go to. The states will be able to decide how to use this money. So we're basically going to shift the cronyism from the federal government to the state government. And the state will have everybody, everybody lobbying construction companies, asphalt companies, local governments. Everybody's going to be lobby to get a piece of this. I have a feeling that the cost of building a mile of road or a mile of highway is going to go up significantly. Oh, a bridge. A lot of this is going to bridge. $40 billion, $40 billion. Man, you could fix a lot of bridges with $40 billion. $40 billion are going to go to repairing, replacing and rehabilitating bridges. Now I read you a report from the civil engineers of America saying that, or I guess a critique of that report saying that, you know, the infrastructure in the United States is not that bad. Bridges are not falling apart. Yeah, there's some. And local government should take care of it. State government should take care of it. And the way to fund these things, well, it should be the way to fund these things. If the government was going to do it, what would be the way to fund it? Gasoline tax and tolls. You tax the people who are going to use it. It's the closest you get to fee for services. If you're going to fix this road, or you're going to fix roads in a particular state, raise the gasoline tax in the state. But no, the Democrats insisted that it not be a use tax because they don't believe in that personal responsibility thing. You pay for what you use. They don't believe in any of that stuff. They want us, people like me. Well, not me, but you who don't live in a state who don't use the bridge, who don't use the road to pay for whatever they want you to pay for. It's truly, it really gives you insight into the egalitarian nature, this idea that we don't have, we don't raise use taxes when we want to build something like roads. Best Fed Hank says, here's a taste just a five minute rant on Trump he wants. He put 50 bucks on that. All right, I mean, I still expect 100 when I do the rant. I'm trying to figure out where to fit it in, right? Maybe infrastructure is not a bad place to fit it in. We'll get to it. So $40 billion in budget repair. We've got $1 billion on reconnecting communities. That's where the communities have been divided by highways and other infrastructure. And I don't know you built tunnels under the highways bridges over the highways. So we connected God. It also going to fund planning design demolition and reconstruction of street grids parks and other infrastructure. Do you imagine the the the cronyism that this is going to entail? Can you imagine that the the push pull that the the other the Pope peddlers, they didn't go in there trying to grab a piece of 1.2 trillion. I mean, even just a tiny sliver of 1.2 trillion is a lot of money, more money than I'll ever have. They say 20% of the nation's highways and major roads are in poor condition and 45,000 bridges. Again, bullshit. All excuses to get this money out there. All excuses. You know, where's this money going to go? It's going to go to contractors. It's going to go to unions. It's going to go to state coffers. It's going to go to job creation. It's going to go to high wages. I mean, I talked about that. It was stuck with your pool. A bill like this is just perfect for the Aristotle. They just spend spend spend all of our money. All right, we are past 400 bucks. So thank you all. You all stepped up. You all got that really nicely. We need to get to, you know, at least 600 at least 600 tonight to start catching up to where we need to be for the month of August. We don't want the month of August to be below the normal kind of average kind of. Revenue generating month on super chat. All right. $39 billion to modernize public transit. Right. Much of that is going to go to a significant portion of that is going to go to Amtrak. And by the way, Amtrak, they're going to change the purpose of Amtrak. So Amtrak used to have as its mission statement to try to make money. They've given up on Amtrak has never made money. So they're basically abandoning the idea of Amtrak making money. And now it's just going to serve you. The whole purpose now is going to be serve you because if they make money, they can't serve you or they won't serve you. It's not primarily a serve you kind of thing. It's 39 billion to modernize private transit. 40 39 49. No, wait a minute. 66 billion. Oh no, 66 billion. This is an addition. Another 66 billion in passenger freight train. Why does the US government need to invest in freight trains? Isn't it like under freight companies, pretty private? What is it about? I mean, talk about colonialism. The train companies are going to get a big chunk of 66 billion and they're going to get better lines. And they could get and then and then the left is going to say, see, see the only reason we have good trains in America is the government invested in them. We think we should get a share of the profits broadband. 65 billion. 65 billion to improve the nation's broadband infrastructure. I don't know. Isn't Elon Musk putting satellites into the sky to improve the global broadband infrastructure? Like I in Puerto Rico have great broadband. We're enjoying it right now. Yeah. Don't stop, please. But no, the government has to step in. 65 billion, by the way, Elon Musk is going to get some of those 65 billion. Because if he can show that some of the satellites he's putting up there to provide internet to poor people, to people generally, if poor people use it, the government will give him money. They will subsidize it. 65 billion dollars to provide internet to for bridges that go nowhere, highways that go, you know, for rural places. And this will allow people to work from home from anywhere they want. So it's good, right? This is how they're using your money. You know, broadband is a profitable business. Let me just say this. One aspect of this was defeated, which is so good. In the initial proposal of Biden made, they were going to start up publicly, not publicly, government owned businesses to provide broadband and compete with private businesses, compete with private businesses. Here, instead of doing that, and the left is furious that they're not doing this, they want public entities to compete with the private sector. Here what they're doing is they're just basically subsidizing the private sector. It's raining money, but not in my direction. I need to go, I should return to civil engineering, which is my profession from two, three lifetimes ago. And I should go and do some construction and get a piece of this. This sounds really lucrative. Airports, ports and waterways. Oh, wow. They were only getting like 17 billion for ports and 25 billion for airports. Like that's why I think they put a lot more money. Again, why privatize the airports? Let them make money. That would give them an incentive to be nice. And then 7.5 billion for low emission buses and ferries. That's good. That's good. I don't know where the electricity will come from. Another 7.5 billion to build a nationwide network of plug-in electric vehicle charges. Why isn't there profit motive to do that? If we're all going to be driving electric cars, you'd think that the private sector would want to build this plug-in electric vehicle charges. God, the amount of corruption that's going to be here, the amount of waste that is going to be here is just unimaginable, unimaginable. Oh, and then we haven't even reached power and water systems. 65 billion to rebuild the electric grid. 55 billion to upgrade water infrastructure. 50 billion on top of that. I mean, the 50 billions are just being thrown here left and right. We'll go towards making the system more resilient, protecting it from drought, floods, cyber attacks. Again, how successful do you think they're going to be at that? 21 billion to clean up Superfund and Bondfield sites. Haven't they been investing tens of billion dollars to do that for decades, decades now? How this will be paid for, right? They're going to add 350 billion. The CBO said that this is going to add 350 billion to the deficit. Congress said, ah, we don't agree with the CBO. So how do they pretend they're going to raise money for this, right? COVID relief funds, I said that already. They're going to auction some spectrum, which they're going to use for this, but they're going to auction the spectrum anyway. So that's super cheating. Let's see. They're going to have Superfund fees that they're going to raise 50 billion from. And they're changing the tax reporting requirement for cryptocurrencies. Now they claim to be getting 20-something billion from the cryptocurrency tax reporting requirement. So here's the thing. The crypto community is going nuts over this. Basically what the bill says is if you're a cryptocurrency broker, it doesn't define broker. Indeed, its description of broker is very broad. You have to send into the tax authorities every transaction. Every client that transactions in more than $10,000 over crypto. Now, why would the authorities want this? To make sure all you crypto traders are paying your fair, so-called fair share of taxes. This idea is they're going to collect 20-plus billion dollars from all the taxes that they haven't collected because people are being not declaring they gained from crypto because now the brokers will have to declare it. The problem is that what this is going to do is it's going to load up the whole crypto system with bureaucracy. They're going to have to create accounting rules, reporting rules, reporting protocols for everything. Anonymity goes out the window because every transaction, $10,000 or more, has to have the names, addresses reported to the IRS. Crypto community is going nuts. They lobbied heavily to get this excluded. As a consequence, there was an amendment to the bill proposed to change it. That amendment failed. The bill is going to the House of Representatives as is. What this will mainly do is move most crypto currencies offshore. All it'll do is destroy jobs, take away business and move the whole thing offshore. So they're never going to see the $20 billion they think they are. They're dreaming. They're dreaming. So this is where we are. This is where we are. Oh, more savings are going to come from delaying a Trump administration rule about Medicare and Medicaid. How drugs are priced and paid for in Medicare and Medicaid. They're delaying it to 2026 and that counts as a saving. They also are predicting that the infrastructure bill itself will generate $56 billion in economic growth, which is taxable. And that'll generate revenue, right? 33% return on investment. They expect 33% return on investment. All right, now that is nuts. The return on investment in this is probably going to be negative, given the efficiency with which the money will be deployed, given the efficiency of choosing infrastructure projects, they're not going to be chosen based on production or productivity. If it gets any positive return on investment, if you can even calculate it, it will be very low, but it would much more likely to be negative. The whole thing is, it's just mythology and pretend and fantasy economics and fantasy politics that everybody buys it. And I don't know, 20 Republicans voted for this or 19 Republicans voted for this. It's just disgusting. And of course, and here you go, best friend Hank, just for you. And of course, this has been a bipartisan issue from the beginning, right? Trump came up to office in 2016 advocating for an infrastructure bill. He wanted to spend two to three trillion dollars on infrastructure bill. Indeed, his major complaint about this bill is it's too small. It's not big enough. I mean, what Trump did to the Republican Party is it made it a leftist party when it comes to economics. It made it a party of central planning. It made it a party of industrial policy. Why is it the role of the national federal government to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure? When that infrastructure is best spent by the people who actually use the infrastructure, ideally private, but if it's not private, then it should be the states. Why not use things like gasoline taxes to raise the revenue for it? But Trump made it so that it's completely acceptable for, and indeed required, I think, even though Trump was against this particular bill, for Republicans to rally around an infrastructure bill. Because if Trump wasn't against an infrastructure bill, then it must be, this must be good. And the Trump supporters all love this kind of stuff. This is the government doing good things. How? Where? It's how the American people, particularly the American people, used to be members of the Tea Party, who used to be limited government conservatives, who used to be physical hawks, cared about deficits. What Trump did is he basically eradicated that point of view from the Republican Party. He basically made it unacceptable to hold those views. To be a Trump Republican is to be a big government Republican. It's to be a Republican who believes in government intervention and economy. Government intervention and trade. Government intervention in infrastructure. Government intervention in drug placing. You remember all the bills about drug placing? They're just delaying right now. And of course, he committed. He committed in 2016. He committed time and time again not to touch entitlements. How are you going to cut deficits? How are you going to cut the deficits? How are you going to get government limited if you can't touch entitlements? He was going to save entitlements. So if you stand up today and say, no, we need to change entitlements, well, the pro-Trump is not going to support you. If you're going to say government shouldn't be spending $1.2 trillion when we're running massive deficits on infrastructure, for that matter, on anything else, you're not worth the program anymore. Government is the cure for problems. If you're worried about deficits, why? No, the public is worried about deficits since somebody remind me since Calvin Coolidge maybe, certainly not Bush or Trump. Where is this free market, right-wing free market support going to come from? Support for the free market going to come from. It's not going to come from Trump. It's not going to come from Trump supporters. It's not going to come from, yeah, Goldwater. Thank you, Tom. I was thinking of somebody, no, Reagan didn't care about deficits. Reagan supported massive deficit spending. Deficit grew dramatically under Reagan in spite of the fact that tax revenues grew under Reagan when he cut taxes. So the Laffer Cove actually worked. He managed to approve and to sign spending bills that were greater in their growth rate than the growth that he had generated in tax revenues. Yeah, I mean, a few Republicans voted against the infrastructure bill more because they're going to vote for anything against anything Democrats proposed. But a number of Trump loyalists like Lindsey Graham voted for it. The Republican Party has been emptied from its free market advocates. The free market advocates don't come anymore and don't appear on stage anymore at the conservative conferences. No free marketer will run for president. It's all about social issues and it's all about granting the left, granting the left, the high ground when it comes to economic policy. 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 broads. 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 are liking it, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. 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