Overall, 81% of respondents support an infrastructure bill one way or another. As you'd expect, Democrats prefer pairing it with a tax increase on the rich, while Republicans prefer putting it on the national credit card.
If there's any surprise here, it's that Republicans are fairly closely split on the tax increase. You don't often see 32% of Republican voters supporting a big tax increase on the rich.
Will this have any effect on actual Republicans in Congress? I doubt it, but I guess we'll see.
My earlier post about bridge failures was a bit of a dog's breakfast, so I was left still wondering how our roads compare to other countries. I don't have any axe to grind here; I'm just scratching a curiosity itch.
In any case, the data on this appears to be surprisingly sparse. The only thing I could find was a table of ratings put together by the World Economic Forum, and they provide two different scores. Here are their overall scores for the 20 biggest countries by GDP:
And here are their results from a survey that asks specifically about road condition:
I don't have any independent view of how reliable these rankings are, but maybe they're better than nothing? Maybe. They probably provide at least a rough idea of how good the roads are in various large countries.
POSTSCRIPT: Why did I choose the 20 biggest countries by GDP? Because using a consistent metric eliminates selection bias, and GDP provides a nice mix of rich countries and large developing countries.
A few months ago I posted pictures of the new Gerald Desmond Bridge in Long Beach before it was opened to the public. I've been meaning to go out and see it again now that I can drive on it, but for some reason I've never gotten around to it. I finally did on Monday, a dex night when I had plenty of time to kill.
There's still no place to get up close to the bridge, and it was a slightly hazy night as well. On the plus side, it turned out there was a full moon rising just behind the bridge, which was a nice little bonus. The bridge changes color slowly, but only between deep blue and a sort of washed out purple. If you ask me, they could add a little more to their repertoire.
Technical notes: Both of these pictures were processed using Topaz DeNoise, which promises to remove noise from photographs without simply blurring them. It seems to work well on some kinds of pictures and not so well on others, but it did a good job on these. The night sky is pretty noisy even though I used a fairly low ISO setting, and Topaz cleaned it up pretty well.
The bottom photo is a panoramic shot. It would have taken an ultra wide angle lens to get anything similar in a single frame, and even that might not have done the job.
NOTE: This post is probably wrong. What I'd really like is the number of bridge failures compared to the total number of road bridges, but it's not clear that either of those numbers is available in a reliable way across countries. I suspect that my overall conclusion is still correct (namely that the US is sort of middling when it comes to bridge infrastructure) but it's hard to say for sure.
I'll keep looking for something better, but for now I'm crying uncle. I just don't know if the data is available to really say anything about this.
After four years of waiting, it's finally Infrastructure Week. And that got me curious: The poster child of lousy US infrastructure is our seemingly endless series of bridge failures. But how do we compare with other countries? You can probably guess where this led me.
It turns out that Wikipedia has both a list of bridge failures by country and a list of each country's road network size. Isn't that great? The internet is truly a blessed thing.
Ideally, I'd like to know the number of bridges per country, but road network size is a pretty good proxy. So I counted up bridge failures over the past two decades and then calculated the number of failures per million kilometers of road network. I promise that I had no idea how this would turn out before I did it. Here's the result:
This list includes the top 20 countries by road network size. The US is kind of middling, clocking in at 4.1 failures per million kilometers, nearly identical to the EU as a whole.
This is just a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation, but I think it still provides a good sense of where everyone stands. Obviously the US is rich enough to do better, but we're hardly some kind of huge outlier in the bridge failure department.
UPDATE: I've updated the chart so that it shows the top 20 countries by size of road network. This eliminates the selection bias in the original chart, which included all countries with more than two bridge failures.
Here's a look at new COVID-19 cases over the past few months:
Case counts stopped declining and began to plateau on March 14. Ten days later, on March 24, confirmed deaths began to plateau.
Cases began to rise on March 22. On April 2 or thereabouts, confirmed deaths will probably start to rise too.
We know this relationship. It's obvious and well established. If cases start to rise, then deaths will start to rise a couple of weeks later. By then, however, it's too late to do anything. We just have to ride it out.
And yet, time after time, we ignore it. We see that the case count is declining and start opening things up well before the count is even in the general neighborhood of zero. When the case count begins to plateau, we look the other way and hope that it's just a blip. When it becomes clear that it's not a blip, we shrug because, hey, there's nothing we can do about it now.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's no wonder the head of the CDC feels a sense of impending doom.
POSTSCRIPT: Will vaccines save us this time around? To some degree, probably yes. But why couldn't everyone have waited just another few weeks? Why didn't the CDC try to convince everyone to wait a month, instead of simply issuing vague guidelines? I don't know. It's above my pay grade.
— Jason AKA The Dove of Oneness (@j_consolidation) March 31, 2021
In real-world politics you take what you can get. Flint has put lead pipes in the news, so it's a good time to promote a plan to replace them all over the country.
In an ideal world, however, I'd spend the money on soil remediation, which is a bigger problem on the lead front. The truth is that most lead pipes are safe these days as long as you don't destroy the passivation layer that's been built up over the years by properly treated water. Poorly treated water in Flint destroyed that layer, and that's why lead leached into the drinking water.
Of course, in a super ideal world I'd replace the pipes and do soil remediation. A guy can dream, can't he?
The housing market is going nuts, and it's mainly because of supply:
The number of units for sale has been dropping steadily ever since the housing bust in 2008, and by 2019 it was down to about the level of 2000. Then the pandemic hit and supply took a sudden downward tick, presumably because lots of people decided they didn't want to sell in uncertain times.
But now, with the end of the pandemic in sight, plenty of people want to buy. And as we all know, when demand is high and supply is low, the great equalizer is price. So housing prices are up and homes are selling fast. A retired couple I know put their house on the market recently and it sold in three days at the full asking price. Hooray! Unfortunately, they can't find a house to buy where they're planning to move. So instead they're going to spend a year renting and then try again.
Unless I'm miscounting, this amounts to $950 billion for things that are traditionally thought of as infrastructure (red bars) and $1,280 billion for other things.¹ This is all paid for by tax increases on corporations.
My guess is that Biden knows perfectly well that Republicans will never support anything that includes tax increases, so he figures he might as well add lots of non-infrastructure stuff to his infrastructure bill. After all, why not? One way or another, it's going to live or die based on votes from Democrats, and the non-infrastructure stuff isn't going to bother them a bit.
¹This depends on the details of what's in all the stuff in the blue bars, so take it as tentative for now.
Over at National Review, Rich Lowry has been doing yeoman's work defending the Georgia voter law. I'm already on record as not being all that concerned about the details of early voting and mail ballots and so forth, which I don't think have nearly the effect that conservatives hope for and liberals fear. So I'll skip all that stuff and instead offer just two comments.
No more water for you! (Cat shown for scale.)
First, are liberals overplaying the ban on handing out water bottles in line? Maybe a bit, but it really is in the law and it's a stupid own-goal. If the roles were reversed, Tucker Carlson would devote an entire week to the subject of patriotic, hardworking Americans keeling over in long lines thanks to Democratic hatred of white people.
Second, the detailed voting stuff isn't the biggest problem with the Georgia law. The biggest problems are the provisions that (1) remove authority from the Secretary of State and give it to a politico appointed by the legislature, and (2) allow the legislature to take control of local election boards that are "underperforming."
The first provision is plainly nothing more than revenge against Brad Raffensperger, who refused to knuckle under to Donald Trump's desire to "find" a few thousand additional votes in 2020. It's pretty obvious that Georgia Republicans never want that to happen again and are planning to appoint a chairman of the State Election Board who will slavishly do whatever Republicans want him to do.
The second provision is designed to allow the legislature to take over Democratic election boards in urban areas if they feel like it. Republicans have a long, long history of insisting that urban areas with large Black and Hispanic populations are rife with fraud, and this is just the latest continuation of that fabrication. There's no evidence for it, but it appeals to the GOP's white constituency so it's useful to keep it going. It's disgraceful.
In the end, the question is this: Do "reasonable" Republicans agree that our current election laws—which are already insanely partisan—should become even more partisan? This is pure Trumpism, which they claim to oppose. So why defend it when someone is so clearly following Trump's lead? Instead, why not support something that makes voting less partisan? Shouldn't that be a goal that everyone aims for?
