If you want to get to know the other, the darker side of the United States in addition to the glittering world of Manhattan, you don’t have to do more than get on a train on Subway Line 7 in Times Square and travel east for 30 minutes. Here, in the immediate vicinity of the baseball and tennis stadiums, is Willet Points, a district that you might expect to be in Mumbai or Kolkata, but not in the self-proclaimed capital of the world: the streets with their cracked tar coverings are reminiscent of alpine ski resorts. Mogul slopes – lined with half-disused cars and dead trees. Garbage and car tires float in oily, shimmering puddles of mud, the power lines dangle from the wooden masts. There is no sewer system that could remove the sewage from the many small car workshops.
It is America that visitors from Europe rarely see. For many US citizens, it’s everyday life. America of power outages, dead spots and the clammy rail company Amtrak, whose meager rail network has as much in common with the high-speed lines in Japan, France and Germany as a horse-drawn vehicle with a Formula 1 racing car. It is America whose modernization Congress now finally wants to tackle: After the Senate, the House of Representatives also approved a program to renovate the infrastructure on Saturday night, which all in all is spending more than one trillion dollars (around 850 billion euros ) includes.
The passage of the law is a success, especially for President Joe Biden, which he desperately needs after a long argument in Congress and in view of the poor poll results. This is all the more true as the months of paralysis in parliament were not due to the usual squabbles between the government and the opposition, but rather to a tangible conflict in Biden’s own Democratic Party. Although practically all MPs are behind the infrastructure program, the strong left wing of the party, the “progressives”, repeatedly prevented a parliamentary vote in order to force the “centrists” to agree to another, roughly two trillion expensive, government social and climate package. However, that failed again on Friday because some centrists asked for more figures on the cost of social reforms.
Pelosi forces her party to vote
In order to finally get through at least the infrastructure package, Nancy Pelosi, the spokeswoman for the House of Representatives, finally forced her party friends to a vote on Saturday night. In the end, the government emerged victorious – but only because 13 Republican MPs also approved the bill. Six progressive democrats, on the other hand, voted no on principle.
The infrastructure package provides for new expenditures amounting to 550 billion as well as the reallocation of already approved funds of another 450 billion dollars. The state plans to spend around 110 billion dollars on the repair of roads and bridges alone, and 73 billion dollars are budgeted for the renovation of the weather-prone, partially ailing power grid. The modernization of the railways will cost 66 billion dollars, the government plans to provide 65 billion and 55 billion dollars respectively for the expansion of the broadband network and the rehabilitation of lead-contaminated water pipes. Another 39 billion will go into the modernization of local public transport. Seniors and people with disabilities in particular have little opportunity to use the narrow, outdated buses and trains in cities like New York. $ 7.5 billion will be invested in building a nationwide network of charging stations for electric cars.
Large parts of the law are to be funded by reallocating funds that were earmarked for other purposes. But budget deficits are also likely to continue to grow sharply: According to calculations by the independent budget bureau of Congress, the program will require additional net borrowing of $ 256 billion over the next ten years.
It remains to be seen whether Biden will be able to implement the second part of his reform agenda
The question now is what will become of Biden’s social and climate program, which includes the abolition of the often horrific daycare fees for three- and four-year-olds, the permanent introduction of a kind of child benefit and tens of billions to reduce CO₂ emissions. The massive additional expenditure is to be financed through tax increases for companies and wealthy citizens.
The chances of an early adoption in the House of Representatives are not bad. Five key representatives of the centrists signaled their approval in writing on Friday in the event that the cost review by the budget office of the Congress did not reveal any unexpected additional costs. The next hurdle would be the Senate, where the Democrats only have a majority thanks to the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. However, two of their senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, are rejecting parts of the package and have already ensured that Biden has cut the total planned spending from the original 3.5 trillion to just under two trillion.
From the president’s point of view, the infrastructure and the social package are core components of his economic reform agenda, with which he wants to make the USA more competitive internationally and reduce social inequality in the country. The fact that the Democrats blocked their own plans had contributed to the fact that the party recently lost the important gubernatorial election in Virginia and Biden’s approval ratings sank to the lowest level that any president had recorded after twelve months in office in the past 40 years – with the exception of Donald Trump .