Can You Smell That Smell?

There’s a meme going around dissing Nancy Pelosi for a sour face allegedly during the part of the State Of The Union where the president was pitching infrastructure spending, saying she should be happy for more proposed government spending. Maybe it was the ‘partner with private sector’ bit that was part of the pitch on infrastructure. That certainly struck me as likely to refer to we taxpayers paying to build stuff, and then continuing to pay some corporate entity forever for the privilege of using it, one of the downsides to such partnerships noted by the American Bar Association. That certainly did not get a smile out of me when I heard it. And a Washington Post opinion piece looks like it confirms my suspicions about the infrastructure plan, and certainly as clued-in as Pelosi undoubtedly is, she probably already knew that the statement as given by the president was merely another proposal to transfer taxpayer money and resources to private hands with as little benefit to the taxpayer as possible to get away with.

As Paul Waldman notes in the WaPo blog:

So we need a federal infrastructure bill. The problem with this one is that it’s being sold as something it isn’t, it makes it harder for states and localities to afford infrastructure projects, it prioritizes private profits over public needs, and in the end if it passes we’d wind up paying more and getting less. In other words, it’s just about what you’d expect from this president.

That unpleasant expression on Pelosi’s face? That’s just the way one should look when one runs into something that stinks.