The US launches the largest infrastructure plan in 65 years: 550,000 million for highways, roads, electricity grid, broadband and drinking water

Joe Biden

has scored his second great victory in the United States Congress, with the approval 'in extremis' of the largest infrastructure plan in 65 years.

In total, that country will allocate

(480,000 million euros) between now and 2030, in roads, railways, electricity grid, broadband access, and drinking water.

Since Republican President

launched the Interstate Highways Program

in 1956

, which for the first time connected the entire country to roads worthy of the name, the United States had not seen a similar program of exclusively civilian spending,

. When this plan is added to other projects that were already decided, the total investment in infrastructure in the US amounts to 1.1 trillion dollars (952,000 million euros) in the next decade, that is, a figure equivalent to approximately two thirds of Spain's GDP (but less than half of what Microsoft or Apple are worth).

The program also has something unusual in the United States:

In fact, without the vote in favor of thirteen Republicans, the plan would not have gone ahead. This is because six left-wing Democrats voted against it, considering the plan insufficient and, above all, because, they say, it will cause an increase in emissions of gases that cause the 'greenhouse effect'. Those six Democrats are the so-called 'Squad' - an expression that is applied to refer to a group of friends -, who tend to identify themselves as "socialists" and among which are some of the 'stars' on the left of the Democratic Party, like

The law had already been approved in July in the Senate, with the vote in favor of the 50 Democratic members of that chamber and 17 Republicans. Now it goes directly to Joe Biden, for him to sign it.

The law may sound huge. But

Above all, when that country barely pays attention to its infrastructures, as anyone who has traveled through the US knows and has seen power lines full of 'junctions' like those that were discontinued in Spain in the 1970s, or trains that They remind the venerable 'Electrotrenes' of

of the eighties and that in the tunnels they have to reduce their speed to 40 kilometers per hour (and that in the only operational railway corridor, which is the one that connects the cities of Washington, New York, and Boston, which means a route of just 1,000 kilometers in a country that is eighteen times the size of Spain).

Finally, there is the problem of the implementation of the plan, in a country with a multiplicity of federal agencies that distribute responsibilities in a poorly defined way, and that also have to coordinate with the 50 states - and, sometimes, with the counties that make up the states - to get any project going forward.

The project will be financed as follows:

• Sale of the electromagnetic spectrum

  for the licensing of 5G telephony;

• Unemployment insurance funds

  that have not been spent because the impact of Covid-19 has been less than expected;

• Postponement of the delivery of a

  new payment system to

  drug-subsidized

  pharmaceutical companies

  ;

• Tightening of the taxation

  of

  cryptocurrency

  transactions

  .

Even so, the infrastructure plan will have, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a cost of 256,000 million dollars (222,000 million euros) in ten years.

That will be less than 0.1% of US GDP in 2030.

Among the main items of the law are:

• 110,000 million dollars (95,200 million euros) for the reconstruction of

  road

  infrastructure

  ;

• $ 46 billion (€ 39.8 billion) to

  rail

  , including $ 21.8 billion to the Washington-New York-Boston corridor)

• 25,000 million dollars (21,600 million euros) to

  airport

  infrastructure

• 17,000 million dollars (14,700 million euros) to

  ports

  ;

• 55,000 million dollars (46,700 million euros) to improve the supply of

  drinking water

  , a serious problem in many areas of the US, including the capital of the country, Washington;

• 65,000 million dollars (56,000 million euros) for the expansion of

  broadband

  telecommunications

• 65,000 million dollars (56,000 million euros) for the renewal of the electrical network, with priority to generation through

  renewables

  .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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