Infrastructure week! Looks like there’s a big ol chunk of cash that will be rolling downhill in the coming years for all the construction companies, broadband companies, materials companies, etc. after Congress finally passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill that they’ve been sitting on for months. Certainly our roads and bridges and public transport systems and national broadband expansion need a lift and the Feds are the only likely source of that, even if I’m sure a lot of the money will be wasted or directed to priorities I wouldn’t agree with (just as happened last time, with the 2009 rescue funding pushing a lot of projects forward as we came out of that recession — I vividly remember the highway department here adding dozens of miles of unneeded guardrails to the interstate, while steel bridges rotted from within).

We throw around these big numbers a lot, and get desensetized to the scale sometimes, but we should remember that $1.2 trillion is a LOT of money — the $550 billion of new money that will reportedly go into physical infrastructure over the next five years is about 10% more than the Feds have already been spending on transportation funding over the past five years. Economic stimulus is moving from regular Americans to construction companies and materials suppliers now, hopefully it will provide a jobs boost in areas where the recovery has not really taken hold as strongly, particularly among folks who never really had the option to “work from home.” Of course, a lot of those companies have also been struggling to hire people in much of the country, so wages will probably go up and more discouraged people will likely re-enter the workforce.

Rising wages and the competition for workers can help drive inflation, of course, though blaming the workers at the bottom of the scale because they’re now getting $15 an hour at Target or Walmart is a bit obscene — I think this is also one of the areas where morality points the way, to some degree. People with lower-end jobs in many cases have been getting squashed in favor of rising CEO pay and MBA-driven “efficiency” strategies and outsourcing (for everyone except executives, of course) for decades, so a little catchup is well overdue, and good for our society, even if yes, it’s probably a negative for some investments in the short term, ...