In a recent interview with The New York Times, Whitmer was asked why President Joe Biden has so far struggled to earn widespread credit for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law among voters.
Her response? Voters have been worn out by the pandemic and many just haven’t been tuned in to what’s happening in Washington.
“I think the pandemic’s taken a toll. People are stressed out,” Whitmer told the Times. “They’re just trying to pay the grocery bill, get the kids off to school, show up at their job, and maybe get a little bit of sleep at night. They’re not consuming everything.”
Maybe the probelm with people’s lives doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the roads. Maybe the fact that people are dependent on those roads should be examined?
Improving roads has secondary effects. First is people must be paid to do the work, meaning money in laborers pockets, though I’m sure execs are also lining their pockets…
Second, goods and services use roads, notably highways and interstates.
Third, better roads do allow cities that are reasonably close together to benefit from each other. Smaller cities with less jobs can have people commute to wherever the jobs are, typically in larger cities.
I agree that the states are too dependent on vehicle infrastructure, but we definitely still need it.
1.2 Trillion dollars could build a coast to coast high-speed rail system with spurs through every major city in America.
That would also be great, but there’s a lot more convincing required for that, hence how we reached this instead.