California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has introduced legislation forbidding the state department of transportation from building or expanding freeways in poor neighborhoods. She noted research showing that freeway expansions allowed more people to travel more, and apparently she doesn’t want to extend such mobility options to low-income people.

Another legislator, state Senator Sydney Kamlager, agreed that the state should focus on “alternative modes of transportation” such as public transit in poor neighborhoods. Transit can’t reach as many places as automobiles and only goes during certain hours of the day, so encouraging poor people to use transit allows more control over when and where they travel.

Don’t tell Garcia and Kamlager that the 2019 American Community Survey found that more than 80 percent of California workers earning less than $25,000 per year took automobiles to work while only 5 percent took transit. The thought of poor people having all of that mobility would probably be downright frightening to them.

Seriously, what kind of a sick society do we live in when people who call themselves progressives think that the right thing to do is limit the mobility of the people who need it most? Someone needs to start a social justice movement demanding that low-income people and minorities have the same access to automobiles and highways as middle-class whites.

The Cato Institute offers lots of great Christmas gifts — Pocket Constitutions (also a good gift for Bill of Rights Day!), books, even Cato-branded Lands’ End merchandise. But I have my own holiday recommendations that I’ve made before.

I decided one year to give a young colleague a post-graduate course in political science and economics — P. J. O’Rourke’s books Parliament of Whores and Eat the Rich. So I went to my local Barnes & Noble to search for them. Not in Current Affairs. Not in Economics. No separate section called Politics. I decided to try Borders (RIP). But first — to avoid yet more driving around — I went online to see if my local Borders stores had them in stock. Sure enough, they did, in a couple of stores just blocks from the Cato Institute. Checking to see where in the store I would find them, I discovered that they would both be shelved under “Humor–Humorous Writing.” Oh, right, I thought, they’re not books on economics or current affairs, they’re humor.

Yes, P.J. is one of the funniest writers around. But what people often miss when they talk about his humor is what a good reporter and what an insightful analyst he is. Parliament of Whores is a very funny book, but it’s also a very perceptive analysis of politics in a modern mixed-economy democracy. And if you read Eat the Rich, you’ll learn more about how countries get rich — and why they don’t — than in a whole year of econ at most colleges. In fact, I’ve decided that the best answer to the question “What’s the best book to start learning economics?” is Eat the Rich.

On page 1, P.J. starts with the right question: “Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?” Supply-and-demand curves are all well and good, but what we really want to know is how not to be mired in poverty. He writes that he tried returning to his college economics texts but quickly remembered why he hated them at the time–though he does attempt, for instance, to explain comparative advantage in terms of John Grisham and Courtney Love. Instead he decided to visit economically successful and unsuccessful societies and try to figure out what makes them work or not work. So he headed off to Sweden, Hong Kong, Albania, Cuba, Tanzania, Russia, China, and Wall Street.

In Tanzania he gapes at the magnificent natural beauty and the appalling human poverty. Why is Tanzania so poor? he asks people, and he gets a variety of answers. One answer, he notes, is that Tanzania is actually not poor by the standards of human history; it has a life expectancy about that of the United States in 1920, which is a lot better than humans in 1720, or 1220, or 20. But, he finally concludes, the real answer is the collective “ujamaa” policies pursued by the sainted post-colonial leader Julius Nyerere. The answer is “ujaama—they planned it. They planned it, and we paid for it. Rich countries underwrote Tanzanian economic idiocy.”

From Tanzania P.J. moves on to Hong Kong, where he finds “the best contemporary example of laissez-faire.…The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.”

You could do worse than to take a semester-long course on political economy where the texts are Eat the Rich and Parliament of Whores. So, bookstore owners, leave them in the Humorous Writing section for sure, but also put copies in the Economics, Politics, and Current Affairs sections.

Still time to buy them for Christmas and educate all your family and friends while they think they’re just being entertained!

Here at Cato we’ve written many times about the record of big infrastructure projects and “megaprojects”:

• Cost overruns are rampant.
• “Here is a rule of thumb to remember when you hear about a proposed government project: If a politician says that it will cost $1, it will end up costing $2 or more.”
• “Contractors were essentially rewarded for delays and overruns with added cash and guaranteed profits.”
• “The ongoing saga of California’s high-speed bullet train may end up being as classic a story of Democratic politicians’ hubris as the Solyndra debacle.”
• “Linda Bilmes, coauthor with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, analyzes the massive problems in three somewhat smaller government projects — the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, and the Big Dig artery construction in Boston — and finds that ‘in any organization that starts to increase spending very rapidly there are risks of waste, fraud and inefficiency.’ ”
• “In fact, as megaprojects expert Bent Flyvbjerg explains in the following article, these grandiose projects operate by an iron law: over budget, over time, over and over again.”

And now we welcome the New York Times to the beat with its impressive Monday story titled “Years of Delays, Billions in Overruns: The Dismal History of Big Infrastructure.” Ralph Vartabedian, who covered the “bullet train” fiasco for years at the Los Angeles Times, lays out problems across the country with big infrastructure projects, from a Honolulu transit line to the Long Island Railroad. Read the whole thing, but you can start here:

Honolulu’s tribulations are far from a lone cautionary tale. To the contrary, they signal the kind of cost overruns, engineering challenges and political obstacles that have made it all but impossible to complete a major, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project in the United States on budget and on schedule over the past decade.…

When California voters approved a bond in 2008 for a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the project was supposed to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. The job is now projected to finish in 2033 for $100 billion, though those estimates are dated and there is an $80 billion funding gap.…

Mr. Schofer said many projects are justified by estimating that future benefits will exceed costs, but when the costs go up astronomically, no one recalculates the ratio.

In a candid admission of how the political world operates, Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, once dismissed cost overruns on a transportation hub intended for the bullet train.

“In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment,” he wrote in a guest newspaper column in 2013. “If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”

And this is, I suppose, no surprise:

U.S. Transportation Department officials declined to comment for this article.

It’s an excellent article. My only complaint is, as Cliff Asness and I both pointed out on Twitter, it would have been more useful to members of Congress and the public if it had been published during the many months that Congress was debating the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan. Maybe members of Congress should ponder it now as they consider another, even bigger — $1.75 trillion? $4.9 trillion? — “Build Back Better” infrastructure+more plan. 

Sen. Ron Johnson (R‑Wisconsin) has been urging his state’s legislature to seize control of federal elections without going through the normal legislative process. As he explained to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, he believes that the Constitution empowers the Republican-controlled legislature to act on its own, without presenting a bill to the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, for his signature or veto.



This theory is based on a superficially plausible but long-rejected interpretation of two clauses in the Constitution: the Elections Clause in Article I and the similar Electors Clause in Article II, which outline the authority of states over congressional and presidential elections. The relevant provisions are as follows:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators. …

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors [for president and vice president], equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…

As Johnson points out, “there’s no mention of the governor” in these clauses.



It’s not the first time this issue has come up: When the Constitution refers to a state’s “legislature,” does that mean only the elected representatives and senators, or does the term mean the state’s regular lawmaking process as defined by its state constitution, including things like a potential veto by the governor or a popular referendum?

Settled Law



The constitutional text is admittedly subject to interpretation on that point, especially regarding the legislative role of a state’s chief executive. There’s not much evidence that the Framers ever considered how a simple reference to each state’s legislature could be ambiguous in this way.



There are other references to state legislatures in the Constitution that clearly do refer to only the legislative body itself, acting alone. For example, prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, state legislatures elected U.S. senators. It was never understood that the governor could veto the legislature’s selection in the same way he or she might veto a bill. Likewise, when ratifying constitutional amendments, each state’s legislature acts on its own, with governors getting no say in the process, nor can the legislature’s decision to ratify be rescinded by referendum.



On the other hand, state power over elections has always been exercised through the normal process of lawmaking. In Smiley v. Holm, the Supreme Court ruled in 1932 that congressional redistricting is this sort of “lawmaking function” in which the state constitution’s normal processes apply. That case explicitly settled a challenge to the governor’s ability to veto such bills. 



The line the Court has drawn is one of structural implication: sometimes the Constitution’s reference to a “legislature” means the state’s elected legislators acting as in effect a distinct body to play a particular role in a federal process, while other times the nature of the relevant function is inextricably tied up with state lawmaking. Administering elections, by both practical necessity and longstanding practice, clearly falls into the latter category. And as Johnson’s proposal reveals, it would be untenable to read the Elections Clause and the Electors Clause the way he wants.



In 2015’s Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, the Court upheld a ballot initiative which had taken away the legislature’s power to draw congressional districts and instead given it to an independent commission. There, the Court again ruled that in this case “legislature” refers to the state’s legislative power, however it might be arranged by the state’s constitution.

Writing for the minority in Arizona, Chief Justice Roberts argued for a stricter literal interpretation of “legislature” on originalist grounds, which would have precluded using ballot initiatives and unelected commissions to cut the elected legislators out of the picture altogether. But as he explained, the dissenters drew a line between mere procedural requirements and substantive restrictions on a legislature’s authority. He made clear gubernatorial vetoes fall into the former category, in much the same way bicameral legislatures must pass bills through both chambers.


In other words, even when they went furthest in the direction of Johnson’s argument, all of the justices held that gubernatorial vetoes are a valid part of making election laws. And that has been the universal practice in the states since the Constitution was ratified, so long as the state gives its governor a general veto power over legislation.



Practical Implications



The body of law and agencies under which elections are conducted in each state are a unified whole, not easily divisible into some things which can be done by regular legislation and other things which could be done by some other process under some other authority. The whole bundle constitutes each state’s election code and is implemented by the same set of officials and, ultimately, by the same set of voters.



For one thing, the state has to fund the administration of its elections through its regular process of appropriations. It wouldn’t make sense for the legislature alone to be able to order things it can’t fund, and state legislatures can’t typically fund things without presenting a bill to their governor to either sign or veto. This is one aspect which distinguishes the legislature’s role here from things like electing senators (pre-Seventeenth Amendment) or ratifying constitutional amendments, which require no funding or further actions by state officers to carry into effect.



In most states, including Wisconsin, elections for state offices are held on the same day and on the same ballot as federal elections. As even Johnson concedes, his governor-excluding constitutional theory would only apply to elections for federal offices, potentially resulting in a bizarre bifurcation of election rules and procedures. Every time that deeply impractical possibility has been raised before, action has quickly been taken to avoid it, including once when Congress and the states acted in record time to amend the Constitution.



Each state must also determine who is responsible for running its elections. In many states, this job falls to the secretary of state, typically themselves an elected official. In others, the state has created a separate nonpartisan agency or a bipartisan commission to oversee elections.



Wisconsin falls into the latter category, having created the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), which consists of three Republicans and three Democrats. WEC is only a few years old, created by Republicans over Democratic objections in 2015 to replace the previous board of retired judges who had handled both elections and campaign finance laws. But now, WEC is seen by some of its critics as insufficiently aligned with the GOP.



In 2020, as in many states, WEC adopted a number of administrative changes to accommodate the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes included waiving the need for state employees to visit nursing homes to assist residents in casting absentee ballots, a change which was not controversial or challenged at the time, when access to nursing homes was heavily restricted to protect the most vulnerable.



But in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s victory and Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the result, these sorts of changes to election procedures were blamed (implausibly) for having produced Biden’s narrow wins in key states, including Wisconsin’s 20,682-vote margin. Some officials have even threatened to indict the WEC commissioners for felonies for allegedly violating the state’s election laws. It is in this context that Johnson has urged the legislature to unilaterally take away WEC’s power over congressional and presidential elections and assign it to somebody else.



If state legislators act on Johnson’s idea, the result would not only be unconstitutional, it would also produce absolute chaos. Local polling places would have to, in effect, administer two separate elections while reporting to two different authorities. They might even have to run two different ballots, if WEC and the new legislative authority make conflicting decisions about ballot design. Worst of all, the rules for who can vote and how might differ.



It’s this last point which reveals the constitutional incoherence of such a possibility, because it would violate an explicit constitutional command. Article I requires that for elections to the House of Representatives, “the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” The Seventeenth Amendment applies identical language to elections for the Senate. If you’re eligible to vote for the members of your state’s legislature, you must also be allowed to vote for your state’s members of Congress.



But that wouldn’t be the case if the elections for state offices and elections for federal offices are governed by different rules and different agencies, raising the possibility of some people being allowed to vote for one while being excluded from the other. For example, if two different sets of rules were adopted for absentee voting, or for voter ID requirements, then some people would inevitably be allowed to vote under one but not the other. This would be a clear violation of one of the Constitution’s most unambiguous requirements, which is why the Constitution does not intend or contemplate splitting the state’s authority over elections in this way.



Back to the Drawing Board



There are plausible constitutional arguments about the limits of executive actions or judicial decisions to stray from what the legislature has directed by state law, and those arguments can and should be litigated prior to Election Day. As the Arizona case revealed, there are also divisions on the Court about if voters or unelected bodies can be included as part of the “legislature,” but there’s no such dispute about the inclusion of governors. The bottom line is that any attempt to change election statutes must follow the state’s constitutional procedures for making laws, with the governor either signing a bill or else the legislature mustering the votes to override his veto.



Elections have consequences. In Wisconsin, those consequences currently include a divided government with neither party in total control. Since the state’s governor is a Democrat, and Republicans do not have a veto-proof legislative supermajority, that means any change to the state’s election rules must garner bipartisan support. In other states, the situation is reversed, with contentious redistricting decisions pitting Republican governors against Democratic legislators.



When a state’s constitution and the choices voters have made force members of both parties to work together, that’s a feature, not a bug. The federal Constitution does not provide a way around it.

In Michigan, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) has qualified to begin gathering signatures to appear on the ballot next year. It appears likely the petition will succeed, since it enjoys the backing of prominent and experienced Democrats.

The basic premise of the NPVIC is to have states each pass an identical piece of legislation under which they would award their electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide. The states would implement this plan once enough states controlling 270 electoral votes have signed on, guaranteeing that the national popular vote winner will win the presidency. Currently, the NPVIC has been adopted by 15 states plus the District of Columbia, together controlling 195 electoral votes.

The NPVIC is not a new idea. Cato’s John Samples criticized its constitutional and policy merits in a 2008 policy analysis. But in light of the crisis over the 2020 election and the prospect of a repeat or worse in 2024, it’s worth taking a skeptical look at the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how the NPVIC would work.

There are lively debates about if a national popular vote is desirable at all, and if the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a constitutional way to get there. But even for those who support a national popular vote and think the NPVIC clears all the constitutional hurdles, there’s a more concrete practical problem which has been neglected by the plan’s drafters.

The problem is best summed up by a simple question: Who won the national popular vote in 1960?

The usual answer, and the figure you’ll find reported in most places, is that John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon, 34,220,984 votes to 34,108,157 votes. “I didn’t pay for a landslide,” Joe Kennedy, JFK’s wealthy and well-connected father, supposedly remarked. But the reality is not so simple, even aside from credible claims of corruption and fraud in key states.

The ambiguity comes from a single state which chose an unusual system for picking its presidential electors. Instead of voters choosing from slates of electors pledged to a particular party’s ticket—the system we’re used to in most states today—Alabama’s legislature chose a different method. Each of Alabama’s eleven members of the Electoral College were chosen individually by voters statewide, with each voter allowed to pick any eleven candidates. The names Kennedy and Nixon did not actually appear on the ballot.

Each party could nominate eleven candidates for the state’s eleven elector seats. Driven by opposition to civil rights, Alabama Democrats nominated five Kennedy electors together with six who were unpledged to any candidate. All eleven Democratic electors won, with each of them garnering more votes than any of the eleven Republican candidates, but the number of votes they received varied.

The six unpledged Democratic electors ended up voting for segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia, along with all of Mississippi’s electors and one from Oklahoma. Their intent was to deny either major-party candidate a majority in the Electoral College, letting conservative southern Democrats play kingmaker when the election was thrown to the House under the Twelfth Amendment. Kennedy still won a majority without them, making it moot. Similar unsuccessful attempts were made in 1948 and 1968 by segregationist candidates Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.

Under the system as it stood in 1960, and still stands today, that was that. How things would have played out under the NPVIC plan is not so clear. In fact, it’s hopelessly ambiguous.

If the total number of voters who voted for Kennedy electors and the unpledged electors are divided proportionally between them, the result is that Nixon actually won the national popular vote by about 50,000 votes. This was the method used by Congressional Quarterly at the time, the source usually taken as the closest thing we have to an official national popular vote tally. Another way of interpreting the result allocates to Kennedy the vote total of his most popular elector, which has him winning the national popular vote. The problem is this method effectively double-counts voters who voted for both the Kennedy electors and the unpledged electors.

The bottom line is there’s no objectively correct answer for which way to count Alabama’s popular votes in 1960. And because of that, there’s no way to say for sure if Nixon or Kennedy really won the national popular vote.

This might seem just a bit of obscure electoral trivia, and indeed it didn’t change the outcome of that year’s election. It’s also unlikely the exact circumstances which led Alabama Democrats to nominate a mixed slate of electors will be repeated any time soon. But it highlights a hidden weakness in the NPVIC: It has no way to handle a scenario like 1960. And that precedent points the way for any one state, even a state not participating in the Compact, to render the whole scheme inoperable.

The Compact’s language simply assumes the existence of a traditional popular vote total in each state but it provides no details on how that is to be ascertained. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by opponents. It opens the door for a state to throw a wrench in the works by adopting alternative methods for choosing their electors, methods which are not conducive to producing an unambiguous national popular vote total.

Republicans state legislators, who mostly oppose using the national popular vote, have already figured that out. In North Dakota, the Republican-controlled state senate passed a bill saying their state will withhold its popular vote totals for president until after the Electoral College has voted in December. Instead, the state would only publish the rough percentages. This is deliberately aimed at making it impossible to properly calculate the national popular vote total in time to award electors on that basis. Similar bills have been introduced in other states.

The North Dakota proposal is subject to fair criticism on transparency grounds. Refusing to release the precise vote totals seems unlikely to inspire confidence and trust. Indeed, the state House amended that proposal out of the bill, instead passing a statement urging Congress to oppose the NPVIC and studying other options for the state to block it. But that’s just one example of the ways in which non-participating states could make the operation of the NPVIC impossible, at least as it’s currently written.

Another unintentional example is Maine, where Democrats have successfully implemented ranked choice voting for federal elections, including for president. Under that system, each voter’s one vote can be reassigned to different candidates through multiple rounds of tabulation until one candidate has an absolute majority. The NPVIC does not specify if votes on the first round or the last round should be counted, and either one would defeat the purpose of ranked choice voting.

Maine’s system raises another possible perverse incentive under the NPVIC: it might reward a candidate for doing worse. If a candidate wins an outright majority of over 50% of the first-choice ballots, the tabulation stops then. But if they fall short of 50% and the votes for lower-ranked candidates are then redistributed, the winning candidate might accumulate many thousands more votes in the final round. If those final-round votes are what’s counted for the NPVIC, it could be a huge boon for a candidate to not do too well on first choice votes, so that they get to add those second- and third-choice votes to their national total.

These are just some examples of how the NPVIC could be confounded by variations in state election procedures. Creative and motivated legislators could undoubtedly come up with many more, and they surely would if the NPVIC ever nears its 270 electoral-vote trigger. For example, states could simply take the names of the presidential candidates off the ballot, letting voters pick only between a “Republican” and “Democratic” slate of elector candidates. While this ruse would be transparent, with everybody knowing which party is backing which candidates, it’s not clear that the NPVIC would have a way to count those votes. Worse, there’s no guarantee all of the states in the Compact would reach the same conclusion. 

The NPVIC’s authors could have provided some mechanism for adjudicating this problem, either discounting a state’s votes altogether in such cases or else providing some way to conclusively determine how many votes to count for each candidate. But the Compact doesn’t do that, nor does it have any way for states to harmonize their decision, leaving it up to the election authorities in each state to come up with their own interpretation. Instead of letting voters pick the president, the NPVIC could effectively hand the decision over to a handful of little-known (and partisan!) secretaries of state deciding how to read a vague law with no obvious answer. That’s a recipe for disaster.

In a worst-case scenario, different states in the Compact could make conflicting decisions, throwing the entire scheme into chaos. The only way to fix that now would be to go back and have each state adopt an amended NPVIC law filling in the details, an arduous hurdle. That prospect becomes even more daunting if states begin adopting the NPVIC by popular referendum, leaving their legislatures unable to easily make needed changes.

If the trigger for the NPVIC is ever reached, this practical problem could make the Compact effectively inoperable before the courts even get the chance to rule on questions of constitutionality. Worse, it could throw the outcome of a presidential election into doubt without any clear rules for determining who rightfully won.

In an era when disputed elections are becoming more common and where the laws governing presidential elections are already riddled with dangerous ambiguities, the NPVIC is an invitation to a constitutional crisis. With the world’s most powerful office at stake, America’s presidential election procedures need certainty and stability. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact threatens to bring us the exact opposite, an election in which the rules would be extremely uncertain and unsettled.

Rather than risking such a high-stakes catastrophe, opponents of the Electoral College should accept there’s no easy shortcut around the difficult task of amending the Constitution.

The only good thing about the infrastructure bill that Congress just passed is that it doesn’t include any money for high-speed rail. Unfortunately, it did include far too much money for things like Amtrak, urban transit, and rural broadband.

The infrastructure bill is really two bills in one: first, a reauthorization of existing federal spending on highways and transit; and second, brand-new spending on highways, transit, Amtrak, electric vehicles, airports, ports, clean water, clean energy, and broadband. This entirely new spending is almost entirely unnecessary as the infrastructure crisis was mostly fabricated in order to get Congress do what it always does, which is throw money at problems that are perceived to exist, whether they are real or not.

About half of the transportation dollars in the bill are dedicated to Amtrak and urban transit, modes of transportation that carry less than 1 percent of passenger travel and no freight. While the other half appears to be dedicated to highways, much of that will be spent on projects that will reduce, not maintain or increase, roadway capacities.

All of this is based on a presumption that automobiles are evil and the primary goal of government should be to wean Americans off the automobile and get them into various forms of government-owned mass transportation. Even if you believe that automobiles are a major contributor to global climate change, many states and cities have made enormous efforts to get people to reduce their driving since 1970, and all of them have failed.

States are already lining up to get some of the $66 billion that the bill included for Amtrak. But even if the bill had spent twice that on Amtrak, it wouldn’t have significantly increase passenger train ridership. In most of the markets where Amtrak wants to expand service, airlines and/​or bus companies already provide excellent service at fares that Amtrak won’t be able to match even with all of its subsidies.

Senate Republicans managed to get the new funding for urban transit reduced from Biden’s proposed $80 billion to about half that. But it is still way too much, especially considering that the reauthorization half of the bill includes more than $70 billion for transit.

The reality is that transit and intercity passenger trains are obsolete technologies that only survive because of giant taxpayer subsidies. I personally love passenger trains, but I don’t think they should be subsidized any more than Tom Hanks, who collects manual typewriters, thinks taxpayers should subsidize a manual typewriter industry. If we end the subsidies, transit will survive in New York City and a few passenger trains might survive on especially scenic routes, but elsewhere no one would particularly notice their absence.

The bill also includes $65 billion for rural broadband based on overestimates of how many people lacked access to high-speed internet. According to the White House, which originally proposed this spending, “more than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure.” But according to the Federal Communications Commission, only 21 million Americans “lacked access to fixed terrestrial” broadband in 2019, and all of those Americans had access to satellite broadband if they wanted it. The main beneficiaries of this $65 billion will be broadband companies and high-income exurbanites.

All of this spending is on top of the three coronavirus relief bills passed by Congress in April and December, 2020, and March 2021, which included more than $116 billion for transportation. Some 59 percent of the transportation dollars in those bills, or $69 billion, was dedicated to transit systems that had lost more than half of their riders due to the pandemic. In retrospect, considering the supply-chain problems we are experiencing today, that money should have been spent on freight transportation instead.

The infrastructure bill does include $17 billion for ports, but most of this will be too little, too late to solve today’s supply-chain problems. The real lesson of this bill is that the government shouldn’t be involved in funding marketable services, like transportation and broadband, as it is too likely to get captured by entrenched interests while it ignores real problems.

There are still those who believe Congress should fund a high-speed rail network, but recent news about China’s high-speed rail systems provide another lesson about government failure. China has twice as many miles of high-speed rail lines as the rest of the world combined. To build those lines, China State Railways and provincial governments have gone trillions of dollars in debt. Some of China’s high-speed rail lines earn less in ticket revenues than the cost of the electricity used to power those lines, and the system as a whole is losing $44 million per day.

To help pay for the lines, China State Railways has increased freight rates 11 times so that it now costs twice as much to ship freight by rail as by truck (compared with less than one-fourth as much in the United States). As a result, the share of freight moved by rail has declined from 50 percent in 2005, when China began building high-speed rail, to 17 percent in 2016, and probably less today.

Some experts, including Beijing Jiaotong University Professor Zhao Jian, believe that China’s high-speed rail program will lead to a debt crisis far worse than the Evergrande crisis (which was manufactured by the government to punish wealthy housing developers). Americans can count ourselves fortunate that we at least dodged this bullet train.

A front-page headline screams “Inflation Is Back at Highest in Over a Decade.” That sounds as if inflation recently came back up to a record peak after a nice period of quiescence. Actually, inflation was twice as high from March to June as it has been since.

The lower numbers of the past three months are still bad enough, yet the difference between higher and lower numbers seems worth mentioning. Change seems to mystify and elude TV and newspaper reporters because they discount recent news and keep extolling “The Mystifying Arithmetic of Year-to-Year Inflation Estimates.”

Earlier this year, from March to June, inflation was rising twice as fast (0.73% a month) as it has since. On a year-to-year basis, the June CPI in was 5.32% higher than in June 2020 when we just starting to pull out of pandemic lockdowns. This September, the latest year-to-year change was still 5.38% – slightly higher than it was in June. Inflation must have sped up, right? On the contrary, the graph shows that the recent monthly pace of inflation has been reduced by half with no effect at all on the misleading yet newsworthy year-to-year changes.

In the past three months, the CPI rose by 0.39% a month. A year earlier, from July to September of 2020, the average monthly increase was 0.37%. Since monthly increases were the same, how could the year-to-year increases remain stuck at around 5.3% for June, July, August, and September? The reason the infamous year-to-year change is so hard to budge is that each monthly change is far more affected by ups and downs over the preceding 11 months than it is by the latest rise being half as large as four others included in the dozen.

In the spring of 2022, the year-to-year comparisons will finally be measured against the steep increases of March-June of 2021. After that, the spring 2021 increases will finally start to drop out of subsequent 12-month averages. Economic reporters may (or may not) then figure out that low year-to-year inflation headlines are statistically much easier to achieve if you base the comparison on high base numbers such as those of spring 2021 rather than the low COVID-19 lockdown numbers of 2020.