Monday, January 28, 1974. End of the Siege of Suez.

The Israeli siege of the Egyptian city of Suez ended at noon.  The IDF withdrew and the 20,000 encircled Egyptians were able to withdraw across the Suez Canal.

Suez.

Both Time and Newsweek's covers dealt with the Nixon tape. U.S. News & World Report's cover was on inflation.  

Sports Illustrated had a cheesecake photo, although it hadn't crossed over into pornography on the cover yet, for its swimsuit issue. Ann Simonton was the cover model, who was actually relatively covered.

Indonesian President Suharto took control of the country's internal security agency.

Bolivia was declared to be in a state of siege following a peasant uprising at Cochambamba.

Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier fought for a second time in a non-title fight.  Ali won.

George Foreman was the heavyweight champion at the time.

Unwarranted nostalgia. Two instances, one which isn't.

The Arming and Departure of the Knights (of the Round Table), a tapestry.  I feared Uncle Mike was going into the Kennedy at Camelot point of view of things, but he didn't.  This tapestry, as idealized as it is, might serve as a pretty good reflection of the 60s and of the Arthurian legend, which features adultery, armed conflict, and defeat.  Not cheery.

1963: The Last Summer, Part I

I really like Uncle Mike's blog.  It's one of two I have up here by New Yorkers (the other being City Father), and on a website like this you're going to get some nostalgia, like it or not, but it can serve to really reflect how our recollections of the past are pretty messed up in some instances.

Uncle Mike's essay starts off:

The Summer of 1963 was a beginning for some, and an ending for many more. America would never quite be so young again as it was that year.

The essay goes on from there to note a bunch of stuff that happened in 1963, and does a really nice job of it.  I was prepared to condemn it, but I can't upon reading it.  The part I'd still object to is the opening line.  "Never quite be so young again"?

Well, maybe, but in part because 1963 was on the cusp of the real 1960s.  1963, quite frankly, was in the late 1950s, era was.  The 1960s, as I've written here before, actually started in 1964 or 1965.  I guess that means I'm placing myself as being born in the cultural 50s, but I'd also note that the real 1950s featured the Korean War, the Cold War, conscription, and a host of other bad stuff.

A lot of which were going on in the early part of the calendar 60s, some of which Uncle Mike notes.

So the post wasn't nostalgic delusion.

This is political nostalgic delusion:

Nikki Haley

@NikkiHaley

·

Jun 24

Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023

Eh?

The view of the world that seemingly many people have about the past.  Even as this great Rockwell was being painted, the greatest war the world has ever fought was raging, which was part of Rockwell's "why we fight" point.  We'd win, but bring it to an end by using an atomic bomb, something that stained our morality in the cause and which has been a burden on the world every since.  And at the time that this was painted, there was no freedom to sit where you wanted, if you were black, in much of the US.  The "innocence" of our past is never as innocent as we might suppose.

I remember growing up that we were losing the Vietnam War and inflation was destroying my parent's savings. 

I don't like a lot of the way things are headed now, but we weren't living in a Normal Rockwell painting at any point in the past.

Nikki Haley was born in 1972, which means that she's a decade younger than me (thank goodness the GOP has some candidates that aren't 120 years old).  That means that she grew up in the 70s and 80s.

I can recall the 70s and 80s.  Indeed, I've done so here in a series of post on that topic, Growing up in the 1970s, Growing up in the 1980s .

I don't know if I have a more accurate recollection of being young than other people seemingly do, or if I lack a gene which causes us to romanticize the period of our youth.  Either way, the 1970s weren't exactly all skittles and beer, or whatever the proper analogy was.  Inflation was rampant, we lost the Vietnam War, Iran took our embassy staff hostage. . . you recall all that, Nikki?

Life wasn't actually all that simple if your parents were constantly worried about the price of absolutely everything.  The cost of gasoline was a weekly topic.  Watergate's investigations were on the news.

Do I remember how simple life was?

Yes, because I was a kid.  For most kids, life is a joy because you are a kid. Same with being a teenager, really.

I was in my late teens and early 20s in the early 80s.  For part of that time I lived at home, and I hunted and fished as I would.  Sure, life was simple, because I had no financial worries, being a single guy with no responsibilities whatsoever.

Even at that stage, however, your DNA will come in and pull the brakes and levers. Pretty soon you are worrying, or should be, about your future, including your economic future. And you'll start to look for what modern boneheaded lexiconites call "a partner", meaning a spouse.  It's the way of the world.

None of that is simple.

So was that time about faith, family, and country?  Maybe where Nikki lived, but where I lived, probably less so.  Everyone, pretty much, where I lived at the time, and where I still do, was a cultural Christian, and the mainline Protestant churches were still strong.  This was before the onset of Southern Populism brought about by that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan.  I'm Catholic, of course, but the shift was notable.  To people just a little older than me there was disruption in the Catholic Church as reformers came in and took out the altar rails, etc., but I didn't hear much about that at home really, probably as I was a kid.  Now that I'm far past being a kid, I don't really appreciate a lot that was done to the Church in that period, by which I do not mean Vatican II.

Anyhow, people were at least culturally Christian here, and this is the least religious state in the United States.  People who weren't Christians were likely Mormons.  So I suppose she has a point there.

On family, I suppose, at that time, most families were intact.  Roe v. Wade and Hugh Hefner had started the march to Obergefell, so there were things occurring that were destructive going all the way back to the 1950s, if not before.  The 70s was the real heyday of the Sexual Revolution, and it permitted the entire atmosphere of the culture.  Playboy was sold at the grocery stores in the checkout lines, with the rack designed to camouflage most of the girl on the cover.  Moral decay hadn't set in, in the really perverse ways that would take off in the 1990s, but it had started.

What about "country".

Well, amongst the young, in the 70s, not so much, and yes.  I was in the National Guard for most of the 1980s, but frankly we didn't wear our uniforms off duty if we could avoid it, and we didn't bring it up in casual conversation. Part of that was to avoid getting a lecture from somebody our own age, a lingering aspect of the Vietnam War.  The military recovered under Reagan, but social attitudes weren't what they became later, where everyone was thanking you for your service.  More likely, somebody was going to ask "why?" if you were in the service, or maybe even give you a lecture.

None of which is to say that we don't have a moral dumpster fire going on in our society right now.  But what led us to that was long in coming and will take real work to address.  It isn't as if Joe Biden came in, and it was like electing Caligula.  Our prior President, after all, has a history of behavior that the late Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

The point?

Well, Haley brings up some valid things about the current reprehensible state of affairs.  But it would require a lot more work than voting Joe Biden out.  It's a pretty deep cultural operation, really.

Wednesday, June 13, 1973. Freeze

President Nixon ordered a sixty-day freeze on prices of gasoline and groceries under the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970.

It was the last of the "Phase III" price controls.

On the same day, prosecutors discovered a memo to John Ehrlichman concerning plans to break into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Also, Alexander Butterfield, former Presidential appointments' secretary, met with Senate investigators and revealed the existence of a secret taping system in the White House.

Butterfield.

Butterfield had known Ehrlichman and Halderman from his college days.  After graduating from college, he became an Air Force officer and retired from that prior to going to work in the White House.  In an interview, prior to the public revelation of Deep Throat's identify, he correctly guessed it and the name was published in his interview, although he was not unique in that regard.

The Soviet K-56 with the research vessel Academician Berg killed 27 people.

Monday, April 9, 1973. Operation Spring of Youth.

Israel launched Operation Spring of Youth on Palestinian Liberation Organization targets in Beirut and Sidon, Lebanon.  Over 50 PLO operatives were killed to the loss of two Israeli commandos.

Shipboard Israeli commandos during the operation. By ניר מאור מוזיאון ההעפלה וחיל הים - ניר מאור מוזיאון ההעפלה וחיל הים, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43634278

The operation was part of the ongoing retaliation for the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The United Nations Organization for African Unity conference on Southern Africa opened in Oslo, Norway, which is not anywhere near Southern Africa.  Norway was hosting the event.

As part of the Nixon effort to combat inflation, grocery stores were required to post signs at their meat counters listing the limit for prices per pound for meat. 

Tuesday, March 6, 1973. Oil Price Controls

Oil pump jacks, Teapot Dome, 1973.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 6: 1973   President Richard Nixon imposed price controls on oil and gas.

This from our companion blog, although It's not entirely accurate the way it's stated.  Price controls had actually come in during 1971 in order to combat inflation.  On this day in 1973 the Cost of Living Council issued Special Rule No. 1, which imposed price controls after the "controls" had become voluntary.

Nixon era price controls would prove to be a spectacular failure, and this one in particular failed to grasp that petroleum supplies now included large scale importation, something well beyond American control.  This would prove to be the case in the upcoming fall, when OPEC would put in place an embargo on the export of oil to the United States, something that would have an enormous impact on the state's economy.

The fact that efforts at price controls went back to 1971 is telling.  It's common to assume now that rampant inflation in the early 70s began when the price of oil skyrocketed following the Yom Kippur War, but in fact they were already rising at the start of the decade.  In no small measure, this was due to the Johnson Administration's "guns and butter" economic strategy of the 60s, in which the United States attempted to pay for the Cold War military, the Vietnam War, and a massive increase in social spending without disrupting the economy.  Cynics would note that inflation, which started in the 60s, helped reduce the actual cost to the government of such programs, which it did, but whether somewhat intentional or not, the economy simply could not endure it.

1973 Spring Training commenced with games played in the majors with designated hitters, in the American League, played for the first time.

Famous author Pearl S. Buck died at age 80.  Her work is most famously associated with China, where she had lived for many years.

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part V. The Inflation Edition.

Inflation is now at a 30 year high.

Sears, 1979.

Throughout the entire Biden Administration there's been warnings about this in no small part as the COVID-19 relief packages that were coming forth in his administration, heirs to the ones that had already come out in the Trump administration, were hitting just as it seemed that the crisis was more or less over. As it turned out, the pandemic wasn't over, but the public tolerance for stay at home orders was, so the official response to them went to mask and vaccination mandates instead.  The public had basically decided it was time for everyone else to go back to work.

And by everyone else, I meant that.

A lot of people haven't gone back to work and have been able to avoid doing so due to the economic support for staying at home.  They've gotten used to it, and they've realized that the capitalist industrial economic model pretty much sucks for a lot of average people.  It turns out people liked the way that the world used to be way, way back, although they haven't really fully figured out what way way back was actually like yet.  

The problem is that the modern economy doesn't have room for everyone to do that, or indeed for hardly anyone to do that, so people aren't going back to work. That's creating a labor shortage. That's causing prices to rise.

Added to that, COVID 19, as we all know, caused a shipping backlog that hasn't been worked out. That was caused, in part, by a decades long policy of shipping jobs that Americans working as lawyers, accountants, and upper white collar corporate officers didn't figure Americans wanted, or should have.  Now they're overseas, which means the products these jobs result in are sent here in container ships, almost all of which come in through one single American port, the Port of Los Angeles, which is stupid.

When things get here, they're then in part shipped by trucks, but truck driving is a lousy job and even before COVID there was a shortage of truck drivers.  Now there's a massive one as during COVID they didn't need to be on the road and a lot of them aren't going back.

Of course, the sane thing to do would be to ship more stuff by rail, but a century long subsidization of the trucking industry through public highway construction has made that difficult.

Nifty.

Now we're going to have a massive infrastructure expenditure that we still haven't really figured out, but what we can surmise is that lots of money is going to be spent to build and rebuild stuff, which means a lot of workers will need to be employed doing that, when we have a labor shortage.

More inflation.

Here's what the White House says that bill will do:

Today, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness. For far too long, Washington policymakers have celebrated “infrastructure week” without ever agreeing to build infrastructure. The President promised to work across the aisle to deliver results and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. After the President put forward his plan to do exactly that and then negotiated a deal with Members of Congress from both parties, this historic legislation is moving to his desk for signature.

This Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will rebuild America’s roads, bridges and rails, expand access to clean drinking water, ensure every American has access to high-speed internet, tackle the climate crisis, advance environmental justice, and invest in communities that have too often been left behind. The legislation will help ease inflationary pressures and strengthen supply chains by making long overdue improvements for our nation’s ports, airports, rail, and roads. It will drive the creation of good-paying union jobs and grow the economy sustainably and equitably so that everyone gets ahead for decades to come. Combined with the President’s Build Back Framework, it will add on average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.

This historic legislation will:                               

Deliver clean water to all American families and eliminate the nation’s lead service lines. Currently, up to 10 million American households and 400,000 schools and child care centers lack safe drinking water. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will invest $55 billion to expand access to clean drinking water for households, businesses, schools, and child care centers all across the country. From rural towns to struggling cities, the legislation will invest in water infrastructure and eliminate lead service pipes, including in Tribal Nations and disadvantaged communities that need it most.

Ensure every American has access to reliable high-speed internet. Broadband internet is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school learning, health care, and to stay connected. Yet, by one definition, more than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds – a particular problem in rural communities throughout the country. And, according to the latest OECD data, among 35 countries studied, the United States has the second highest broadband costs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will deliver $65 billion to help ensure that every American has access to reliable high-speed internet through a historic investment in broadband infrastructure deployment. The legislation will also help lower prices for internet service and help close the digital divide, so that more Americans can afford internet access.

Repair and rebuild our roads and bridges with a focus on climate change mitigation, resilience, equity, and safety for all users. In the United States, 1 in 5 miles of highways and major roads, and 45,000 bridges, are in poor condition. The legislation will reauthorize surface transportation programs for five years and invest $110 billion in additional funding to repair our roads and bridges and support major, transformational projects. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal makes the single largest investment in repairing and reconstructing our nation’s bridges since the construction of the interstate highway system. It will rebuild the most economically significant bridges in the country as well as thousands of smaller bridges. The legislation also includes the first ever Safe Streets and Roads for All program to support projects to reduce traffic fatalities, which claimed more than 20,000 lives in the first half of 2021.

Improve transportation options for millions of Americans and reduce greenhouse emissions through the largest investment in public transit in U.S. history. America’s public transit infrastructure is inadequate – with a multibillion-dollar repair backlog, representing more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations, and thousands of miles of track, signals, and power systems in need of replacement. Communities of color are twice as likely to take public transportation and many of these communities lack sufficient public transit options. The transportation sector in the United States is now the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation includes $39 billion of new investment to modernize transit, in addition to continuing the existing transit programs for five years as part of surface transportation reauthorization.  In total, the new investments and reauthorization in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal provide $89.9 billion in guaranteed funding for public transit over the next five years — the largest Federal investment in public transit in history. The legislation will expand public transit options across every state in the country, replace thousands of deficient transit vehicles, including buses, with clean, zero emission vehicles, and improve accessibility for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Upgrade our nation’s airports and ports to strengthen our supply chains and prevent disruptions that have caused inflation. This will improve U.S. competitiveness, create more and better jobs at these hubs, and reduce emissions. Decades of neglect and underinvestment in our infrastructure have left the links in our goods movement supply chains struggling to keep up with our strong economic recovery from the pandemic. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will make the fundamental changes that are long overdue for our nation’s ports and airports so this will not happen again. The United States built modern aviation, but our airports lag far behind our competitors. According to some rankings, no U.S. airports rank in the top 25 of airports worldwide. Our ports and waterways need repair and reimagination too. The legislation invests $17 billion in port infrastructure and waterways and $25 billion in airports to address repair and maintenance backlogs, reduce congestion and emissions near ports and airports, and drive electrification and other low-carbon technologies. Modern, resilient, and sustainable port, airport, and freight infrastructure will strengthen our supply chains and support U.S. competitiveness by removing bottlenecks and expediting commerce and reduce the environmental impact on neighboring communities.

Make the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. U.S. passenger rail lags behind the rest of the world in reliability, speed, and coverage. China already has 22,000 miles of high-speed rail, and is planning to double that by 2035. The legislation positions rail to play a central role in our transportation and economic future, investing $66 billion in additional rail funding to eliminate the Amtrak maintenance backlog, modernize the Northeast Corridor, and bring world-class rail service to areas outside the northeast and mid-Atlantic. This is the largest investment in passenger rail since Amtrak’s creation, 50 years ago and will create safe, efficient, and climate-friendly alternatives for moving people and freight.

Build a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers. U.S. market share of plug-in EV sales is only one-third the size of the Chinese EV market. That needs to change. The legislation will invest $7.5 billion to build out a national network of EV chargers in the United States. This is a critical step in the President’s strategy to fight the climate crisis and it will create good U.S. manufacturing jobs. The legislation will provide funding for deployment of EV chargers along highway corridors to facilitate long-distance travel and within communities to provide convenient charging where people live, work, and shop. This investment will support the President’s goal of building a nationwide network of 500,000 EV chargers to accelerate the adoption of EVs, reduce emissions, improve air quality, and create good-paying jobs across the country.

Upgrade our power infrastructure to deliver clean, reliable energy across the country and deploy cutting-edge energy technology to achieve a zero-emissions future. According to the Department of Energy, power outages cost the U.S. economy up to $70 billion annually. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal’s more than $65 billion investment includes the largest investment in clean energy transmission and grid in American history. It will upgrade our power infrastructure, by building thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewables and clean energy, while lowering costs. And it will fund new programs to support the development, demonstration, and deployment of cutting-edge clean energy technologies to accelerate our transition to a zero-emission economy. 

Make our infrastructure resilient against the impacts of climate change, cyber-attacks, and extreme weather events. Millions of Americans feel the effects of climate change each year when their roads wash out, power goes down, or schools get flooded. Last year alone, the United States faced 22 extreme weather and climate-related disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each – a cumulative price tag of nearly $100 billion. People of color are more likely to live in areas most vulnerable to flooding and other climate change-related weather events. The legislation makes our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks, with an investment of over $50 billion to protect against droughts, heat, floods and wildfires, in addition to a major investment in weatherization. The legislation is the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history.

Deliver the largest investment in tackling legacy pollution in American history by cleaning up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaiming abandoned mines, and capping orphaned oil and gas wells. In thousands of rural and urban communities around the country, hundreds of thousands of former industrial and energy sites are now idle – sources of blight and pollution. Proximity to a Superfund site can lead to elevated levels of lead in children’s blood. The bill will invest $21 billion clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned oil and gas wells. These projects will remediate environmental harms, address the legacy pollution that harms the public health of communities, create good-paying union jobs, and advance long overdue environmental justice This investment will benefit communities of color as, it has been found that 26% of Black Americans and 29% of Hispanic Americans live within 3 miles of a Superfund site, a higher percentage than for Americans overall.

Part of what this does is stuff that industry could do all on its own.  High-speed internet?  Not a government problem.  Roads?  Local problem.  Clean water?  Mostly a local problem.

Why then don't local governments take care of this?  Because they can't really deficit spend, that's why.

Now, like everyone else, there are something  in something like this that I like, because I like them.  And there are things that need to be done. Granted.  But without taking on the larger societal issues that already exists, and which this may make worse. . . well. . . 

More inflation.

Which means for people on a fixed income. . .well they're getting poorer.  People who want to buy something like a house. . . well they're dreams are postponed.  And people who are thinking about retiring. . .they likely won't.

Related threads:

Supply Chain Disruption and Other Economic Problems

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part IV

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part III

Eating the Seed Corn

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part II

The 2021 Wyoming Legislature, Part I

Blog Mirror. Grocery prices, April 25, 1971.

 

1971 Grocery Prices

Infrastructure and Inflation

Delia Kane, age 14.  The Exchange Luncheon, Boston.  January 31, 1917.

General Motors and Ford are having to cut automobile production due to a chip shortage.  Chrysler has already idled some plants.  All over the country constructions materials are climbing in price so rapidly that prices quoted one week, aren't good the next.

What can we do to make that a really roiling inflation fire?

Well poor a bunch of dollars back by nothing into the economy, that's what!

The real news on the economy is being missed, which is simply that it never got as bad as the news outlets had it. Rather, for the most part, people kept their jobs throughout the pandemic but the workers worked from home, if they could.

Where things were bad is in the service sector, and that makes sense.  Workers working from their homes didn't go out at noon and get lunch, for example, and in many places restaurants just closed down. That part of the economy isn't rebounding and, frankly, it might not ever rebound.  This shift towards home offices may simply be permanent, and for more than one reason.  Some workers don't want to go back into the office, and some employers realize they don't need offices.  Effectively, we're getting a revival of a early 19th Century, and earlier, style of employment when artisans of all types, and professionals as well, simply moved from one part of their house to another for the work day.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that it was actually the post mid 19th Century style of employment that was deeply unnatural and only came about due to the Industrial Revolution.  You can make shoes as a single shoemaker from your house.  Amalgamated Mega Shoe can't do that.  Amalgamated drove individual shoemakers, for this example, mostly out of business through economies of scale over time, and people who makes shoes went into the factories.

Well, more accurately for this example, they went into the factories and the shoe makers went to Southeast Asia and China and now people in those areas are making them.  But never mind, you get the point.

Or take lawyers and doctors, for example.  At one time most of them just went to another part of the house, unless they were in relatively large cities.  Now, almost none of them do that.

Well, the old pattern has returned in a modified form.  People are largely still working for somebody else but a lot of them aren't coming into the office and they're not going to.  This is going to have a permanent effect.  Restaurants, bars, etc., that really depended upon downtown workers are never going to see that business pick back up.

Indeed, a friend of mine who is a Denver native recently went back downtown for the first time since the pandemic (that person no longer lives in Denver) and reported downtown abandoned to the street population.  Denver's always had a pretty sizable street population but its really grown since Colorado adopted the fiction that week=money.  In actuality, weed=social problems=decay=spending money, but no mind.  I noticed this too last time I was downtown.  I don't think it will rebound.

Given that, this is a probable permanent shift.

No infrastructure bill is going to change this.

Which means the Delia Kane's of this country aren't going to have their economic boats lifted by an infrastructure bill.

Indeed, the entire thing is either charmingly naive or massively cynical, I'm not sure which.

As the economy has pretty much rebounded, as it never really collapsed, but the service sector remains sick, a person has to believe somehow that investing in infrastructure will cause a revival in that sector and, if you don't want to make the entire economy sick, you have to believe either that 1) the sort of "infrastructure" being discussed will boost jobs for these very people, or 2) a collapse in the infrastructure is keeping people from going downtown, or 3) people aren't looking at the data.

Clearly people know you can go downtown, so #2 isn't it. They just don't want to.

So, basically, what we're being lead to believe is that everyone works in this sector and pouring money into the economy this way is for all of our benefits. But that's false.  So what you have to believe in order to support it is that all the Delia Kane's are going to switch over to being Rosie the Riveter, or that every infrastructure workers will be really hungry during lunchtime.

Miss Kane now?

There probably is an element to that hope. I.e., the thought may be that now that these jobs are gone forever, and jobs like them of which there are a pile, a migration will follow boosting infrastructure spending.

Maybe, but at this rate it will also boost inflation, and if that doesn't completely kill the downtown economy nothing will.  Right now there are a lot of things in flux, maybe, in regard to that.  One thing is that companies that maintain expensive downtown rentals are likely wondering if they should keep them.  If they were able to keep on keeping on during the pandemic with people at home, they're probably figuring they don't need to.  And if the owners of the buildings have to start raising the rents due to inflation, they'll abandon them and accelerate the shift.  That will hurt the downtown businesses even more.  And, it was like the disasterous 1970s, and the 1970s were a disaster, we'll see a period of stagflation, that's almost impossible to stimulate the economy out of.  During that period, which I'm old enough to remember, the Federal Government tried to bring in wage and price controls which failed.  People quit eating out as you couldn't afford it.  It was horrible.

Ronald Reagan brought the country out of that period by throwing the economy into a major recession.  People hated him for it, but he was right. And we haven't experienced that again since that time. We're about to.

Indeed, not only are we about to, but like large national debts we're getting government functionaries telling us that we need now worry about "a little inflation". We need to worry about it.

Of course, a person would be well entitled to simply ask how much of this massive spending proposal is not about stimulating the economy or infrastructure at all, but rather a clever way to camouflage an economic and manufacturing transition.  That's a completely different topic, but it doesn't reduce the risk of inflation.  Be that as it may, what that would entail is a big bill pitched to the American people as "infrastructure", as people who live in large cities and the like that see their bridges decaying are really happy to have people who live in  Shoshoni help pay for them, even if the latter will never use them.  If this is it, it's in the age old spirt of "never letting a crisis go to waste".  And there's frankly some merit to that sort of thing, even its really cynical.

And to at least some degree, there's some elements of that at work.  "Infrastructure", generally, are bridges and the like in Old Blight, New York, or some such place. They built them back in the day when New York paid for its own stuff, but anymore, nobody does, so a proposal to borrow money from future generations and tax everyone a little bit more is really appealing to the people in Old Blight, the same way having the Federal Government occupy so many things that were once occupied by state and local governments, or local institutions and even individuals, once did.  But some of it also is an effort to accelerate a fundamental shift in fuel consumption in the US. The Democratic Party has been trying to do this for some time, but now with a supposed crisis in the offering, its being used as a vehicle to do that now.

And your view on that is going to depend on what you think of that effort.