Everybody loves infrastructure. It’s one of the few things Democrats and Republicans agree on these days. When Joe Biden came into office touting plans to spend more money than any president in history, Republicans wisely pushed back. Except when it came to “infrastructure.” Republican votes were key to putting Biden’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act over the top in Congress. The White House was so tickled with this support that it’s been calling the bill the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” ever since.
To be fair, the bill includes some arguably useful spending on, well, infrastructure: roads, ports, airports, that sort of thing. But it also includes a dog’s breakfast of longtime progressive priorities. For example, roughly 20 percent of the bill’s spending is earmarked for fuzzily defined “environmental justice” initiatives, some of which are simply handouts to left-wing activists. But one of the bill’s biggest priorities reflects the left’s three-decade obsession with the “digital divide.” Bill Clinton used to talk about how lack of access to the Internet might leave the disadvantaged in an informational backwater. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which Clinton signed, allocated billions to upgrading Internet service for all.
Ten years later, the smartphone was invented. Within a few years, most Americans (yes, even most poor people) were online 24/7. But the activists still weren’t happy. Today, “digital equity” advocates aim higher: Now they’re concerned that not everyone has the kind of 100 Mbps (Megabits per second) broadband service that will allow multiple members of a household to simultaneously stream HDTV movies, play online video games, and manage a digital start-up out of a teenager’s bedroom. Oh, the humanity!
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
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