The Land of Flickering Lights by Michael Bennet

Author:Michael Bennet [Bennet, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802147820
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

VI. Shark Jaws

Sometimes, late at night, looking out the window at the well-tended and deceptively placid grounds of Lower Senate Park, I do some math. The exercise goes like this: what if, instead of blasting a hole in the budget, we had used that money for productive purposes? What could you do with that same sum of money? I’m not sure Steve Mnuchin and the president really need to pad their paychecks. But the rest of America could use some help.

Here are a few ideas for some onetime projects. We could have fixed our electricity infrastructure by investing in twenty-first-century generation, transmission, and distribution. That would have cost $177 billion. We could have repaired America’s aging dams. That would have cost $45 billion. We could have cleared the backlog for bridge rehabilitation nationwide, $123 billion. We could have cleared the backlog for airport infrastructure, $100 billion. We could have funded maintenance at our national parks and land-management agencies, $19 billion. We could have maintained our tech lead over China for ten years, $50 billion. We could have laid broadband to provide high-speed internet to every rural community in America, $40 billion. We could have cleared Colorado’s entire transportation-project backlog. That’s just $9 billion. We could have eliminated the national backlog for the Rural Water Program, $2 billion. We could have done all of that—and that’s just $565 billion.

So let’s be more ambitious. What if we look at what we could have done differently with the full $5 trillion worth of tax cuts enacted in this millennium—most of which went to the wealthy—and some portion of the $5.6 trillion we spent in the Middle East. What else could we have done? We could have provided larger tax cuts for the middle class. We could have raised the salaries of teachers in this country by 50 percent. We could have provided early childhood education for every child in America. We could have made Social Security solvent for all time. We could have paid down some of our debt, instead of handing it to our children.

But we didn’t do any of those things. Here is what we did instead: We failed to build significant infrastructure at historically low interest rates. We delayed our response to an opioid epidemic that takes more lives every year than automobile accidents. By governing with continuing resolutions, we even undermined our military preparedness. We have two thousand fewer air force pilots today than a decade ago because budget uncertainties have grounded training aircraft that have been scavenged for parts.26 For the first time since John Glenn orbited the earth, we can’t put an American into space on our own spacecraft; we need to ask the Russians for permission to ride on one of their rockets.

At the same time, we backed away to the outer limits of a democratic budget process and concentrated more power in Congress around its leaders. They in turn seized the opportunity and abandoned transparent legislative work in favor of self-serving showdown dramas. They replaced the daylight of a committee room with the closed doors of their offices.

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