The time has been nigh for President Joe Biden to make good on his “Build Back Better” campaign slogan, and this week he laid out a $2 trillion infrastructure blueprint that does, in fact, think big. And it promises big – in terms of bricks and mortar, in terms of climate and in terms of people.
The proposal includes the usual catch-up stuff: $115 billion to repair, rebuild and make resilient bridges, highways and roads, as well as another $100 billion to upgrade and build new schools.
The plan also is futuristic in calling for $100 billion in expansions of high-speed broadband across the entire country, and another $100 billion to expand and improve power lines and an essential grid system to push a clean energy shift, along with another $50 billion to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing.
Finally it goes toward a kind of infrastructure we really haven’t much thought of as infrastructure, though it very much is a rather old-fashioned kind of foundational people stabilizer: $400 billion for the “care economy” – home- and community-based services for the disabled and elderly.
It is big thinking. And it’s good big thinking.