The left's war on mobility makes the holidays miserable, but it has far more sinister motives

Never before has so much “infrastructure” been financed and so little built.

Unless, that is, you label Pete Buttegieg's “paternity” leave as “human infrastructure.” Which, by the way, is exactly what the Biden administration did with its trillion dollar infrastructure boondoggle in 2021.

For those of you stuck in yet another hours-long traffic jam on a crumbling road (or worse, stuck at the airport), that may not be much consolation.

Even the liberal Brookings Institution admits that only a third of the $1.2 trillion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) went to roads, highways and bridges. As a result, the Penn Wharton budget model said the bill “would have no significant effect on GDP at the end of the budget window (2031) or in the long run (2050).”

Not only did the Biden administration pass it, but they massively sweetened the tax credit for “qualifying” electric vehicles (Teslas are out) under the Inflation Reduction Act. It's a subsidy for wealthy owners of vehicles that don't produce gas tax revenue for the shrinking Highway Trust Fund (HTF) that builds the roads on which electric vehicles travel.

However, electric vehicles continue to pile up on dealer lots.

More than 25 percent of trust fund spending is diverted to non-highway projects, the worst offender being the public transportation account that builds expensive, ineffective, and now dangerous urban rail projects. The “infrastructure” bill continued to support transit, but so did the COVID relief legislation once politicians saw what was happening to the public after locking down the workforce.

Here, too, the proverbial free-ride is evident, as the few remaining users of these shiny new projects pay only a fraction of their billion-dollar prices. Yet they're still getting their Amazon deliveries over roads and bridges funded by motorists who drove a record 276 billion miles in September.

Add it all up and no one should be surprised that the Treasury Department is calling for another general fund bailout for the insolvent HTF. Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped Biden administration officials from moving forward (unilaterally) with emissions standards designed to get gas cars off the road, despite a sharp drop in tailpipe emissions.

Onerous fuel efficiency requirements (which only a hybrid can meet), combined with fewer federal leases for oil and gas production, and you can see what the Democrats are trying to do: end America's love with the freedom of the road. They have said as much.

In fact, if they really cared about real infrastructure, they wouldn't deplete the highway trust fund by eliminating the internal combustion engine. Instead, they are demonizing “gas guzzlers.”

Meanwhile, Occidental is forced to spend more than a billion dollars to “recapture” an inert gas from the air and bury it underground. It's part of the net zero climate nonsense that taxpayers are subsidizing through, you guessed it, the “infrastructure” bill.

Consumers are picking up the rest at the pump.

Believe it or not, this war on mobility has an even more sinister purpose. Refusing to build roads and bridges where people want to live is just a tactic.

For some time, “city planners” have tried to contain “sprawl” away from the decaying cities they help manage and into the suburbs. They've created so-called “smart growth” slogans like “you can't get out of congestion,” as if refusing to build more miles of lane will help untangle traffic snarls.

“Urban growth limits” erected by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) from Portland to Nashville also raise the cost of land directly for first-time home buyers. Check house prices lately? The only slogan that comes close to describing this insidious “new urbanism” is “We've destroyed the city and we're not letting you go.”

What survives of suburban habitat is relegated to high-density “affordable housing” crammed next to mass transit stations to “advance racial and economic equity in the metropolitan area,” at least according to the Council Unelected Twin Cities Metropolitan..

But it's happening all over the country. As high taxes, poor schools, and record crime empty downtown and retailers flee downtown, reawakened MPOs remain determined to do for the 'burbs what they've done for the city.

President Trump's Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson has begun to roll back some, including the Obama-Biden Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rules that racially map community demographics for “fairness”.

My opponent in the 2020 Minnesota Senate race, activist Tina Smith, launched a new housing affordability plan (reminiscent of Obama's destruction of New York's Westchester County) under the auspices of she Mapping of the Housing Discrimination Act.

While in Congress, I wrote a House bill to abolish the Met Council in its current form, but it was saved by people like Senator Smith and her corporate cronies who continue to profit hugely from every Federal contract that goes sour the infrastructure crisis.

Meanwhile, our roads, railways, airports, pipelines, locks and dams are poorly built or, in the case of East Palestine, falling apart. Unprecedented deficit spending on everything but what drives us is the main reason.

The fact is our nation's real infrastructure is overwhelmed, but while Transport Secretary Buttigieg says roads are “racist” and are more concerned with ESG scores, carbon offsets and finding a nanny for your next vacation, nothing will change.

Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press.” Also write a jasonlewis.substack.com.

This article was originally published on the author's Substack page, which can be viewed here.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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