Joe Biden has been annotated his second great triumph at the United States Congress, with the approval ‘in extremis’ of the largest infrastructure plan in 65 years.
In total, that country will allocate 555,000 million dollars (480,000 million euros) by 2030, on roads, railways, electricity network, broadband access, and drinking water.
Since 1956 Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Interstate Highway Program, which for the first time connected to the entire country with roads worthy of such name, the US had not seen a similar program of exclusively civil spending, without tax drops
, Direct transfers to families, or investments in space.
When this plan is added to other projects that were already determined, the total investment in infrastructures in the US amounts to 1.1 trillion dollars (952,000 million euros) in the next decade, that is, a figure equivalent to approximately two thirds
From the GDP of Spain (but less than half of what is worth the Microsoft or Apple bag).
The program, in addition, has something unusual in the United States: the support of the republican opposition.
In fact, without the vote in favor of thirteen Republicans, the plan would not have come forward.
This is because six left Democrats voted against considering the insufficient plan and, above all, because they affirm, it will cause an increase in gase emissions that cause the ‘greenhouse effect’.
Those six Democrats are the so-called ‘Squad’ – an expression that applies to refer to a group of friends -, who tend to identify themselves as “socialists” and among those who are some of the ‘stars’ of the left of the Democratic Party,
Like Alexandria Occora-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.
The law had already been approved in July in the Senate, with the vote in favor of the 50 Democratic members of that Chamber and 17 Republicans.
Now it goes directly to Joe Biden, for this to firm.
The law may sound enormous.
But 480,000 million euros are relatively little for an economy of 18.1 trillion euros of GDP.
Above all, when that country barely pay attention to its infrastructures, as anyone who has traveled by the USA and has seen electric grooves full of ‘splices’ as those who were left to use in Spain in the seventies, or trains that
Remember the venerable ‘electrotrenes’ of the eighties and that in the tunnels they have to reduce their speed at 40 kilometers per hour (and that in the only operational rail runner, which is the one that connects the cities of Washington, New York,
and Boston, which means a route of just 1,000 kilometers in a country that has eighteen times the surface of Spain).
Finally, there is the problem of the implementation of the plan, in a country with a multiplicity of federal agencies that are shared competences in a little defined way, and that they also have to be coordinated with the 50 states – and, sometimes, with the
Counties forming States – to achieve any project forward.
Even so, the infrastructure plan will have, according to the budgetary office of the Congress, a cost of 256,000 million dollars (222,000 million euros) in ten years.
That will suppose less than 0.1% of US GDP by 2030.
