(04-05-2021, 12:16 PM)ken-do-nim Wrote: The way countries work is weird. You would think that performing routine maintenance on the infrastructure is just something that happens, not something that has to go through the law-making process.Routine maintenance is budgeted. Infrastructure is new major projects. You pay FED and State road taxes when you buy a gallon of gas and it's not a tiny amount. Put some new tires on the SUV and a couple extra bucks per tire collected in FED excise taxes (F.E.T.) It's not a small amount of money. Neither is a new bridge. Just an anecdotal tale. I live right by the Mississippi River. We needed a new interstate bridge for 20+ years. They started planning it in earnest about 2012. Construction started in 2017. One span just opened for traffic. The other maybe late this year so almost 5 years of construction. Budgeted at $850 million. Oops they got halfway through it, ran into engineering problems and couldn't finish it for that price. So tough, honor your bid right? Nope, they would have just filed BK and a half done bridge. Final cost will be $1.2B. That's a pretty big miss. That's just one bridge and only three lanes wide in each direction.
Politics are unavoidable but you can sell bridges and highways to the voters, REP and DEM. Congressmen that win a new bridge for their district get re-elected. There is going to be a fair amount of green energy stuff in this legislation. Expect a war because there are plenty of states that are not going to be onboard. This is why I piled into my UTEs that benefit with the migration to green.
On a side note you buy a brand new Telsa. You aren't buying gas but you use and wear out the roads and bridges just the same. You are skipping maybe 50 cents/gallon in fuel tax used to maintain the roads. That's a LOT of money over a year. When EVs go even 25% mainstream this is a big issue. It's gotta be collected somehow. I don't know how much money it is but it's not a small number. Probably a new excise tax is gong to show up on our utility bills for high usage charging an EV. Or pay a tax at the charging station. Roads aren't going to be free for long.