Infrastructure and chill. A couple weeks back, Twitter’s Bluecheck Anti-moon Crew was furious at the notion of people in space. They couched their temper tantrum in the evolving Marxist rhetoric surrounding our imaginary “billionaire problem,” but a look back at the discourse makes clear the trend for many has nothing to do with money. As I argued in American Spaceman, these people really just don’t like space. Not even our publicly-operating NASA, with its paltry $24.8 billion dollar budget, has escaped the ire of shortsighted luddites like Bernie Sanders. Now this week, as if to make the case, our Senate passed a $1.2 trillion dollar spending bill for “Real Infrastructure,” which is to say something like $500 billion dollars on the “modernization” of physical infrastructure that in large part already exists, and another $700 billion dollars on… I mean I’m not even sure how to characterize these items. There are spending allocations for healthcare, childcare, and care for the elderly. There’s a lot of niche “green” programming, there’s military stuff, there’s ambiguous social justice stuff. Critics of the infrastructure bill have mostly focused on the bullshit we’re buying with our newly-minted cash, but it looks like we’re also banning cryptocurrency (destroying things is infrastructure!), and this is not even the bill’s biggest problem. The question consuming me today is how did we come all this way, spend all this money, and not build anything new?

Infrastructure spending is broadly popular, which is likely why this new “infrastructure” bill has a decent amount of bi-partisan support. This is also why so many projects that have nothing to do with infrastructure are framed in such dishonest terms. Infrastructure is exciting. Bridges and tunnels and roads — emotionally, this kind of building recalls a period of American history in which we constructed the physical stuff of our country. Connecting the nation by rail, for example, birthed entire cities, and from a wilderness we built a civilization. That memory lives inside us, animating our cultural sense of self even today, and tapping into that sense of self makes for potent, optimistic politics. It’s a sort of politics I’m taken by myself. At a time of sclerosis and bureaucratic failure, when many of us feel small, the promise of heroic building feels like hope. But, in the first place, heroic building just isn’t what we’re doing here.

In a friendly summary from the New York Times, the sprawling, chaotic, 2,700 page bill is reduced to the following: $110 billion dollars for roads, bridges, and “transportation programs,” including a program focused on convincing kids to walk to school; $73 billion for refurbishing present infrastructure in a more environmentally-friendly manner, $7.5 billion of which is notably set aside for building electric vehicle charging stations, and also including some ambiguous “investment” funding; $65 billion for broadband; $66 billion to repair a bunch of Amtrak trains; $200 billion for pandemic relief in the form of what seems like fairly straightforward welfare programming. It also looks like we finally found $55 billion dollars to replace our lead pipes. These are, as far as I can tell, most of our spending bright spots, and they don’t add up to $1.2 trillion dollars.