| Unleash Prosperity Hotline Issue #255 04/01/2021 |
| 1) The States Strike Back With every passing day, it is clear that Biden is planning the greatest assault on federalism and states’ rights in modern times. The plan is to federalize all policymaking and control over government land and assets in Washington and make state subjugates of Uncle Sam. So we were thrilled to see this news headline from of all places, Alaska:  According to the Anchorage Daily News story: “Gov. Mike Dunleavy says, after 62 years of Alaska statehood, he’s finally asserting the state’s right to control submerged lands under navigable lakes and rivers. ‘We’re now at the point where we will be physically exerting our sovereignty,’ he said during a press conference Friday. Dunleavy sent a letter to President Biden announcing his stance….It’s a statement of defiance to the federal government. He said he’s asking the federal agencies ‘to stop bothering Alaskans’ who are on navigable rivers.” Bravo. We need much more of this defiance of federal overreach from governors and state lawmakers. If anything good can come from Biden tyranny it might be a renewed defense of the forgotten 9th and 10th Amendments! |
| 2) The Right Amount of Federal Infrastructure Spending… $0.00 Joe Biden’s $2.5 trillion infrastructure spending bill is only off by about, oh, $2.5 trillion. Almost all infrastructure in America today should be owned, operated, and financed privately. That includes roads, the electric grid, the internet, airports, rail service, energy projects, and the rest. For those public works projects that are truly “public” the state and local governments should lead, not Uncle Sam. There is no reason why someone living in Montana should have to pay for the New York subway system. Chris Edwards, a fiscal analyst at the Cato Institute reminds us that “the private sector owns most of our infrastructure. In 2019, the nation had a massive $40 trillion in nondefense, nonresidential fixed assets, which is a broad measure of infrastructure. The private sector owns 65% of it, including power stations, freight railways, pipelines, factories, broadband networks, and much else. State and local governments own 30%, including highways, schools, and airports. The federal government owns just 5%, including dams, postal facilities, and other assets.”  The best thing Biden could do to modernize infrastructure would be to remove impediments to building it, such as the Davis-Bacon Act that requires union wages on all federally-funded projects, or the moratorium on drilling on federal lands, or the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline. The Biden plan detaches from the “user pays” principle of financing infrastructure. With all this free money for mayors and governors, don’t be surprised if we start seeing roads paved in silver and gold. |
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