#infrastructure bill

[bigmeatpete69420]

Biden Announces Funding for New High Speed Rail - MeidasTouch Network

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/biden-announces-funding-for-new-high-speed-rail

HIGH SPEED RAIL CONNECTING RANCHO CUCAMONGA AND LAS VEGAS OMGGGG

#high speed rail #american high speed rail #infrastructure bill #american infrastructure

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The White House announced Tuesday that the Biden administration will award $115 million to Jackson, Miss., to upgrade the decaying water infrastructure that has led to multiple water crises in recent years.

In the statement, President Biden credited bipartisan legislation he signed in December for the funds, singling out the work of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who represents most of the Jackson area.

Jackson, once a majority-white city, saw much of its wealthier white tax base leave the city in the mid-20th century following court rulings ending segregation. In recent years, Jackson has seen multiple water crises, including in last August when a rainstorm knocked out a treatment plant and left nearly 200,000 people without potable water. The city was under a state-imposed boil-water notice through Jan. 9 of this year.

This was Jackson’s second water crisis in as many years, after a winter 2021 weather event froze the city’s pipes.

In November, a federal court appointed Ted Henifin to manage the city’s water system. Earlier this week, Henifin announced the city only collects about 56% of water fees it issues, which comes to about $50 million of lost revenue, according to The Associated Press.

In his statement, Biden also pointed to funds in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that would replace all lead pipes throughout the nation.

“While we have made a lot of progress, there is much more work to do to ensure that all Americans have access to clean water. Thanks to my Investing in America agenda, we’re already deploying record resources to communities all across America to replace lead pipes, improve water quality, and rebuild the Nation’s drinking water infrastructure, ensuring it can withstand the impacts of the climate crisis,” he said.

“Until all our children can safely drink water from the tap, our fight for clean water must, and will, continue,” he added.

#us politics #news #the hill #2023 #president joe biden #biden administration #Mississippi #Jackson #water infrastructure #Jackson water crisis #boil water notice #Rep. Bennie Thompson #Ted Henifin #the associated press #infrastructure reform #infrastructure budget #infrastructure bill

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

"Republicans stop fantasizing about the Biden family's package size" challenge...

#us politics #memes #shitpost #president joe biden #biden administration #president barack obama #infrastructure bill #omnibus spending bill #federal budget #2023 #gop #conservatives #republicans #conservatives be like #republicans be like #hunter biden's laptop #hunter biden

[bighermie]

#biden #brunson #drunk drivers #infrastructure bill #world economic forum (wef)

[gwydionmisha]

#Joe Biden #Lauren Boebert #Republicans #Democrats #Green Policies #Clean Energy #Infrastructure Bill #News

[tomorrowusa]

Parts of Europe are currently baking in temperatures over 40° C/104° F. Despite this, travelers on the continent currently are able fly much more cheaply than go by rail – a far more climate-friendly option.

Europe’s cheap flights and pricey train tickets promote dirty forms of transport, campaigners say, with “outrageous” tax breaks encouraging people to heat the planet as they head on holiday. Train tickets are double the price of flights for the same routes, on average, according to an analysis from Greenpeace published on Thursday. The campaigners compared tickets on 112 routes on nine different days. To get from London to Barcelona, they found, the cost of taking the train is up to 30 times the cost of jumping on a plane. Holiday destinations across Europe this week have been baking in deadly heat made hotter by greenhouse gases released from burning fossil fuels. “€10 airline tickets are only possible because others, like workers and taxpayers, pay the true cost,” said Lorelei Limousin, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace. “For the planet and people’s sake, politicians must act to turn this situation around and make taking the train the more affordable option.” Flying is one of the most polluting activities a person can do and also one of the hardest to clean up. Unlike eating a burger or driving a car – which have cleaner alternatives such as plant-based meats and electric vehicles – there is no way to fly without changing the climate. Experts have criticised schemes claiming to offset emissions from flying as flawed.

Europe has a decent rail transport network, so it's not like the air travel is all that necessary to get around.

Air travel is subsided far more than rail travel with public money. Airports and other air related infrastructure eat up a lot of funds which could go into making railways more efficient.

In Europe, airlines pay no taxes on kerosene and little tax on tickets or VAT. Their emissions are only priced for flights within Europe – at a level below the social cost of carbon. A study published earlier this month by Transport and Environment, a green campaign group, found European governments lost out on €34.2bn from poor taxation on aviation in 2022. The “tax gap” is set to rise to €47.1bn in 2025, the report found. “In short: if you fly, you are subsidised; if you take the train, you are punished by higher prices – as well as the fact that the journey is often longer,” said (Linnaeus University Prof. Stefan) Gössling.

If anything, the situation is worse in the United States where passenger rail travel has been taking it on the chin since the 1940s. Video producer Dean Peterson reports on a three-day rail trip he took from Los Angeles to New York in which he describes how passenger rail routes declined over the past century. Though with the recent Infrastructure bill encouraged by a pro-rail Joe Biden, Amtrak is planning major expansion — provided that climate-denying Republicans don't get a chance to derail it.

Improvements in passenger rail service and rail infrastructure are a necessary part of addressing climate issues.

#rail transport #passenger rail #climate change #subsidies for infrastructure #stefan gössling #record high temperatures #europe #tax gap #dean peterson #amtrak #infrastructure bill

[robpegoraro]

Weekly output: broadband funding, International Rescue Committee, Google ads gone wrong, shadow IT, Airbnb trust and safety, Mark Vena podcast, Twitter rate limits

With the Fourth of July happening on Tuesday, I imagine people with real jobs will be taking Monday off–leaving me three days in which I can expect to get an answer out of subject-matter experts for any stories. That is acceptable to me, and I hope I can get in a longer-than-usual nap Monday afternoon. I wrote a bonus post for Patreon readers Saturday: a how-to post covering the streaming-TV…

View On WordPress

#Airbnb #BEAD #broadband funding #chatbot #Collision #Elon Musk Twitter #Google display ads #infrastructure bill #International Rescue Committee #IT risk management #Naba Banerjee #rate limit exceeded #shadow It #spam blog #splog #Toronto #Twitter quota #Twitter rate limit #Vanta

[queenvlion]

#mississippi #water failure #national guard #water facility #infrastructure bill #themore you know

[saywhat-politics]

Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) said he did not vote for the infrastructure bill because he feared it would inevitably lead to socialism.

A bit more than two years ago, Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) explained his vote against what was then referred to as the “bipartisan infrastructure bill” by saying, “I will not be complicit in paving a destructive and irreversible path towards socialism.”

On Monday, when it was announced the state would receive $1.05 billion in federal money from the bill-turned-law to build a new span to replace the 62-year-old Blatnik Bridge, Stauber took a different stance.

“The Blatnik Bridge is aging, and its restoration is essential to ensuring continued economic success, which is why I have long fought for these funds,” he said in a statement.

“Securing the money to help replace this bridge has been a top priority for both states, and I am proud to have worked with my Minnesota and Wisconsin Congressional colleagues to secure this critical investment.”

Stauber is by no means the only Republican, or even lawmaker, to take credit for the impact of a bill they voted against. But Democrats have increasingly made an effort to call out Republicans more often for that behavior, which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has dubbed “vote no and take the dough.”

The Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), the state affiliate of the national Democratic Party, pointed out the apparent hypocrisy.

#minnesota #republican #congressman #pete stauber #blatnik bridge #infrastructure bill

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Elizabeth Warren on weaponized budget models

In yesterday’s essay, I broke down the new series from The American Prospect on the hidden ideology and power of budget models, these being complex statistical systems for weighing legislative proposals to determine if they are “economically sound.” The assumptions baked into these models are intensely political, and, like all dirty political actors, the model-makers claim they are “empirical” while their adversaries are “doing politics”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/04/cbo-says-no/#wealth-tax

Today edition of the Prospect continues the series with an essay by Elizabeth Warren, describing how her proposal for universal child care was defeated by the incoherent, deeply political assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office’s model, blocking an important and popular policy simply because “computer says no”:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-04-policymakers-fight-losing-battle-models/

When the Build Back Better bill was first mooted, it included a promise of universal, federally funded childcare. This was excised from the final language of the bill (renamed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill), because the CBO said it would cost too much: $381.5b over ten years.

This is a completely nonsensical number, and the way that CBO arrived at it is illuminating, throwing the ideology of CBO modeling into stark relief. You see, the price tag for universal childcare did not include the benefits of childcare!

As Warren points out, this is not how investment works. No business leader assesses their capital expenditures without thinking of the dividends from those investments. No firm decides whether to open a new store by estimating the rent and salaries and ignoring the sales it will generate. Any business that operates on that basis would never invest in anything.

Universal childcare produces enormous dividends. Kids who have access to high-quality childcare grow up to do better in school, have less trouble with the law, and earn more as adults. Mothers who can’t afford childcare, meanwhile, absent themselves from the workforce during their prime earning years. Those mothers are less likely to advance professionally, have lower lifetime earnings, and a higher likelihood of retiring without adequate savings.

What’s more, universal childcare is the only way to guarantee a living wage to childcare workers, who are disproportionately likely to rely on public assistance, including SNAP (AKA food stamps) to make ends meet. These stressors affect childcare workers’ job performance, and also generate public expenditures to keep those workers fed and housed.

But the CBO model does not include any of those benefits. As Warren says, in a CBO assessment, giving every kid in America decent early childhood care and every childcare worker a living wage produces the same upside as putting $381.5 in a wheelbarrow and setting it on fire.

This is by design. Congress has decreed that CBO assessments can’t factor in secondary or indirect benefits from public expenditure. This is bonkers. Public investment is all secondary and indirect benefits — from highways to broadband, from parks to training programs, from education to Medicare. Excluding indirect benefits from assessments of public investments is a literal, obvious, unavoidable recipe for ending the most productive and beneficial forms of public spending.

It means that — for example — a CBO score for Meals on Wheels for seniors is not permitted to factor in the Medicare savings from seniors who can age in their homes with dignity, rather than being warehoused at tremendous public expense in nursing homes.

It means that the salaries of additional IRS enforcers can only be counted as an expense — Congress isn’t allowed to budget for the taxes that those enforcers will recover.

And, of course, it’s why we can’t have Medicare For All. Private health insurers treat care as an expense, with no upside. Denying you care and making you sicker isn’t a bug as far as the health insurance industry is concerned — it’s a feature. You bear the expense of the sickness, after all, and they realize the savings from denying you care.

But public health programs can factor in those health benefits and weigh them against health costs — in theory, at least. However, if the budgeting process refuses to factor in “indirect” benefits — like the fact that treating your chronic illness lets you continue to take care of your kids and frees your spouse from having to quit their job to look after you — then public health care costings become indistinguishable from the private sector’s for-profit death panels.

Child care is an absolute bargain. The US ranks 33d out of 37 rich countries in terms of public child care spending, and in so doing, it kneecaps innumerable mothers’ economic prospects. The upside of providing care is enormous, far outweighing the costs — so the CBO just doesn’t weigh them.

Warren is clear that there’s no way to make public child care compatible with CBO scoring. Even when she whittled away at her bill, excluding millions of families who would have benefited from the program, the CBO still flunked it.

The current budget-scoring system was designed for people who want to “shrink government until it fits in a bathtub, and then drown it.” It is designed so that we can’t have nice things. It is designed so that the computer always says no.

Warren calls for revisions to the CBO model, to factor in those indirect benefits that are central to public spending. She also calls for greater diversity in CBO oversight, currently managed by a board of 20 economists and only two non-economists — and the majority of the economists got their PhDs from the same program and all hew to the same orthodoxy.

For all its pretense of objectivity, modeling is a subjective, interpretive discipline. If all your modelers are steeped in a single school, they will incinerate the uncertainty and caveats that should be integrated into every modeler’s conclusions, the humility that comes from working with irreducible uncertainty.

Finally, Warren reminds us that there are values that are worthy of consideration, beyond a dollars-and-cents assessment. Even though programs like child care pay for themselves, that’s not the only reason to favor them — to demand them. Child care creates “an America in which everyone has opportunities — and ‘everyone’ includes mamas.” Child care is “an investment in care workers, treating them with respect for the hard work they do.”

The CBO’s assassination of universal child care is exceptional only because it was a public knifing. As David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud wrote in their piece yesterday, nearly all of the CBO’s dirty work is done in the dark, before a policy is floated to the public:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-03-hidden-in-plain-sight/

The entire constellation of political possibility has been blotted out by the CBO, so that when we gaze up at the sky, we can only see a few sickly stars — weak economic nudges like pricing pollution, and not the glittering possibilities of banning it. We see the faint hope of “bending the cost-curve” on health care, and not the fierce light of simply providing care.

We can do politics. We have done it before. Every park and every highway, our libraries and our schools, our ports and our public universities — these were created by people no smarter than us. They didn’t rely on a lost art to do their work. We know how they did it. We know what’s stopping us from doing it again. And we know what to do about it.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: A disembodied hand, floating in space. It holds a Univac mainframe computer. The computer is shooting some kind of glowing red rays that are zapping three US Capitol Buildings, suspended on hovering platforms. In the background, the word NO is emblazoned in a retrocomputing magnetic ink font, limned in red.]

#empirical facewash #wealth tax #elizabeth warren #cbo #congressional budget office #penn wharton budget model #budgeting #economics #economism #computer says no #pluralistic #universal childcare #build back better #bipartisan infrastructure bill

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) condemned what he described as “revenge politics” as many Republicans have resisted his efforts to speed up the approval process for energy projects.

“It’s like the revenge politics, basically revenge towards one person: me. And I’m thinking, ‘this is not about me,’ ” he told reporters on Tuesday.

“I’m hearing that the Republican leadership is upset and they’re saying ‘we’re not going to give a victory to Joe Manchin’ — Joe Manchin’s not looking for a victory,” he added. “We’ve got a good piece of legislation that’s extremely balanced and I think it’ll prove itself in time. The bottom line is, how much suffering and how much pain do you want to inflict on the American people for the time.”

Republicans, along with Manchin, have long complained that the approval process for energy and infrastructure projects — known as permitting — has been too lengthy and stalled important projects.

When he agreed to pass the Democrats’ climate and tax bill, Manchin struck a deal with Democratic leadership to also pass permitting reforms.

But, as he has tried to push a package of changes through, Manchin has met Republican obstacles, as some members feel slighted over the West Virginia Democrat’s passage of the climate bill.

Republicans have felt spurned after Manchin announced his support for the Democratic bill hours after a bipartisan chips and science bill passed the Senate. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had previously threatened that bill’s passage if Democrats pursued their bill.

The GOP has also complained that Manchin’s changes may not go far enough.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, a coalition of liberal Democrats has also come together to resist the effort, arguing that it will undercut the environmental inspections that often draw out the permitting process.

But Manchin said on Tuesday that “we do not bypass any of the environmental reviews,” which he said was the main difference between his package and a separate proposal from Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).

The Senator also told reporters that the text of his proposal would be released on Wednesday, and that it would explicitly speed up the approval process for the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline is a controversial proposed project that would carry natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia.

#us politics #twitter #tweet #2022 #sen. joe manchin #manu raju #nina turner #expand child tax credits #child tax credit #senate majority leader chuck schumer #sen. chuck schumer #corporate democrats #permitting reforms #permitting #Sen. Shelley Moore Capito #Mountain Valley Pipeline #progressive caucus #infrastructure bill

[unpretty]

accountant thoughts:

so there's a certain amount of fixed costs associated with water systems and wastewater treatment, right? like. sewage. making human shit less toxic. keeping water clean and then getting that water into houses. there are ways that costs increase the more the system gets used, but it would also cost money if it just sat there. it might even cost more money, because the systems aren't designed to shut down and just sit there. if the whole city were abandoned except for one house, and it became the only house served by the water department and the sewer system, there would still be all that base cost associated with the various systems and plants and so on. i'm simplifying because i don't actually know how all that works.

anyway. so from a financial perspective, water and wastewater treatment get cheaper the more people you have being served by the system. because that's more people you can divide the cost up by. that's how the fixed cost works. the fixed cost is less per person the more people there are.

a lot of prisons in the usa are in small towns and rural areas. that's how prison gerrymandering works. you take people out of the cities where they actually live, and you stick them in a prison in bumfuck, and then you say "i represent the 5,000 residents of bumfuck" while ignoring that 4,000 of those residents are in a prison and can't vote.

prisons use a lot of water!

so when they're doing the budgets in a small town, if they say, "here is how much we think it's going to cost to run for the next year, here is how many gallons of water we estimate being used, we will divide the cost by thousands of gallons and that's what we're going to charge", what impact does a prison have? what if a prison represents half of all water usage? how much higher would residential bills be without the prison there? is it a private prison, or is it the state that's paying for that prison's water usage? at what point can it be said that in certain rural areas infrastructure is subsidized by the state through the imprisonment of people primarily from urban areas where infrastructure is allowed to fail

#original #a local prison closed and residents were big mad about the water bills going up #doing the math behind the scenes on how much their bills were previously being subsidized by the prison has haunted me ever since! #idk if i'm coherent i was just reading about more failed urban infrastructure and wondering things

[brother-emperors]

like, I'm old school web comic culture, I like handmade zines that are stapled, I just want to make comics and tell stories and the ranking system of the popular webcomic sites exhaust me to my core, which is why I like tumblr. I want to draw sulla wound fingering crassus and not think about the metrics.

#that said i'm a pretty avid reader of korean webcomics and chinese webnovels when i have the money for it #unfortunately i have not had the money for that kind of thing in like. six years RIP #its part of why i dont really plan to paywall my stuff. i want to like. connect somehow. and thinking about a historical fiction comic #in terms of 'is this something someone will pay for?' over 'this is something i FELT in my BONES' kills me #and i do not mean that as an exaggeration. for like two years i was an art industry artist and it did serious critical infrastructure damag #to me. i do commissions and freelance gigs to pay the bills but all i want to do is draw comics #and hopefully! i will make comics that people will want to support through patreon or something like that! #because i would love to not think about trying to pay my bills with this but unfortunately i have student loans #also eventually i would like health insurance. tbh. or actually. dental insurance.

[utilitycaster]

Improbably, this actually wrenched the pacing back into position IF they can stick the landing of "not spending more than like 2 episodes dealing with Treshi":

Nothing really immediate to do re: the moon except go to Yios

Nothing really immediate to do re: the Gray Assassins except go to Yios

Nothing really immediate to do re: Dancer except have some of the more respectable and well-behaved members of the party, and also probably Ashton, get some more details on FCG's provenance

Nothing really immediate to do re: Feywild Stuff except hope that Yu goes after Ira instead in a month

Calloways can move in and out of the plot as is fitting given that Fearne is understandably upset but willing to build a relationship with them

Most secrets have been actually pried out by now; in addition to FCG, Laudna's whole deal is slowly surfacing.

The four party members with parental issues bonded over that, the rest bonded over doing parkour on a telescope and having mostly normal parents, and then everyone bonded over getting attacked by The Aeorian Candidate

Plot is Stored in the Wildemount Arcane Caster

#critical role #critical role spoilers #we got Ludinus AND pvp AND complex portrayals of parent-child relationships #crops watered skin clear moon city infrastructure bill passed etc

[queen-mabs-revenge]

always on my organizing grind gonna get my building unionized

#just ran into a neighbor who was asking about my electricity bill bc hers is obscene #and we started talking about the building upkeep and how she's nervous to ask for anything bc of the housing market #when the building was furnished 20+ years ago they put in wool carpets and at this point they're literally all infested w moths #but the management agency only changes them out when ppl get on to them #and only then after months of asking #and she's not the only neighbor i know of who has these issues #and yeah gonna talk to the tenants union organizer here and see if we can get a meeting together w people in the building #better to get organised now instead of scrambling when smth shitty happens like a mass eviction attempt #build trust and solidarity in the low moments so that when the crisis moments hit we've already got the infrastructure in place

[manojhosur]

#iaas #cloud infrastructure #infrastructure billing