Apart from Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to either arrest or just do-away with Republican house members all together if they don’t wear masks, the biggest story is still the infrastructure plan approved for floor debate by 67 votes yesterday. Now, there’s a lot we don’t know. Both the White House and the Republican senators have put out summary, so-called fact sheets.

I’ll begin by agreeing with my friend Senator Portman. His WSJ op-ed, posted a few hours ago, calls the deal an agreement for necessary investments without destructive tax hikes. I agree, and Senator Portman expressed his complete opposition to the $5 trillion dollar so-called reconciliation package. He called it “another reckless tax-and-spending bill.”

And I agree that what started as a $2.6 trillion bill with destructive tax increases has been trimmed to $1.2 trillion. I would note that President Trump always wanted a trillion dollar infrastructure bill. He campaigned on it in 2016 and continued to support it throughout his tenure. He couldn’t get it done in Congress, but in some sense this story is another Trump legacy.

Now the numbers inside this plan are still elusive. CBO has no formal price out. I’ve been reading through the White House and Republican summaries. The $550 billion spending number pops up in both, and it looks to me like core infrastructure absorbs about half of the $550 billion. It also looks like hardcore greeny climate change spending will absorb about a quarter to a third of the total. Tough to say exactly right now. We need more details that everybody can read.

I do want to caution though when you read the White House summary, it talks about good paying union jobs (think Davis Bacon forever), tackling the climate crisis, and growing the economy equitably. I continue to fail to understand what they’re talking about. In America we all start out with equal opportunity at the beginning of the race, but we don’t all cross the starting line in one long 350 million horizontal line of income and wealth.

That would be un-American because here in America we believe in rewarding success and enabling folks to use their God-given talents in any way they choose. So this equity theme, which sounds so much like socialism, pops up again. Good paying union jobs. The White House would like to unionize pretty much everything, wouldn’t they? Including repealing right to work laws that exist in about half the states.

Of course, they want to jack up all kinds of minimum wages, health benefits, this and that. And then tackling the climate crisis, I don’t know where the climate crisis is. Physicists like Steve Koonin see no emergency existential threat to our climate. Experts like Bjorn Lomborg argue we can rely on technological advances to solve climate issues rather than government regulations and taxes.

I don’t deny that there are climate issues, I just think they’re totally manageable without destroying our fossil fuel energy base. So looking at the white house summary sheet, I’m just sayin it looks a lot like “go woke, go broke,” same themes as usual. And that troubles me a bit, because I think all these projects in the infrastructure plan — roads, bridges, freight rail, public transit, waterways, ports, broadband, airports, etc. — are going to go through what is called environmental justice review.

Right there I see a big problem. Although some permitting progress was made it doesn’t go nearly far enough to ensure timely project development and conclusions. And lord bless ’em, we’ve got low carbon and zero emission school buses, electric vehicles, electric gas pumps (aka charging stations), green power grids, subsidies for critical minerals for the batteries, critical subsidies for critical energy technologies, demonstration projects, advanced manufacturing tax credits, eco-resiliency.

Really no one on the planet could possibly know how much this stuff is going to cost and how long it’ll take to implement it. And how much this green new deal will destroy the economy. Which leads me to my favorite pay-for in the list is $56 billion dollars from economic growth resulting from a 33% return on investment in these infrastructure projects.

Now that there is a big reach. My question is: Since the Democrats want to raise taxes on everything from corporations to small businesses to capital gains to global taxes on American companies, even death, that’s going to wreck the ROI on everything. I mean you can’t have infrastructure unless you have a healthy functioning economy.

We are not going to tax our way into prosperity. That’s why whatever happens to this infrastructure bill, it’s the big one that will follow it — the big plan fromTeam Biden and the Democrats — that I worry about. So I hope that if Speaker Pelosi doesn’t arrest all the Republican House members, at least some of them will be around to prevent the left-wing woke budget coming down the road after infrastructure.

________

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox News.