Are you covering the Infrastructure Bill?

Congress could vote as soon as this weekend (August 7) on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The legislation would provide funding for road, bridges, rail, public transit, broadband, and water infrastructure.

Goizueta Business School’s Ray Hill can discuss what really needs to be done about infrastructure in the U.S., whether this money will be well spent, and the importance of Federal funding for these projects.

Where should the money be coming from? Government only? Federal or States? What about the idea of private/public partnerships? Hill says the scope for these partnerships is very limited.

The one set of actions that seems to make sense is to ease the permitting process for major projects. Big infrastructure projects take a long time (there’s no such thing as "shovel ready").

The "need for infrastructure" can be used to justify wildly different outcomes. Some argue that we need to modernize the grid to accommodate renewables and distributed generation. But this is a much more expensive proposition than it seems.

Some argue that our power grid is fragile, recommending that we subsidize coal and nuclear plants. The power grid is, in reality, in good condition and is very resilient.