From his CHIPS and Science Act to his trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, President Joe Biden has an ambitious plan to make the United States a country that builds things again. Problem is, there is a large segment of his party that has different priorities.
When the Commerce Department released its regulatory requirements for disbursing more than $40 billion in subsidies to semiconductor manufacturers this week, they included mandates for free child care, set-asides for women-owned businesses, and of course, continued compliance with the National Environmental Planning Act permitting requirements.
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Each of these regulations may have its own separate policy justification, but none of them will make it easier for new or existing firms to create new semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the U.S. In fact, they will all do exactly the opposite and may sink the entire project.
And this is not a phenomenon limited to the semiconductor industry. As left-of-center economics blogger Noah Smith notes, almost every aspect of the nation’s drive to build more things is being thwarted by regulatory barriers. From housing, to transit, to solar, to wind, to transmission lines, the same basic story is unfolding. Both state and the federal government are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure, but the political will to fund these projects is being negated by an unwillingness to roll back regulatory burdens that are driving up the price of construction.
“For decades, I’ve heard progressives, including my friends and relatives, bemoan America’s unwillingness to spend money on things like transit and green energy,” Smith writes. “But now America is spending all the money, and things still aren’t getting built, because of the country’s broken system of permitting, land use, and development.”
“Money is not physical stuff,” Smith continues. “Just because you earmark $5 billion for a subway or $2 billion for a solar farm in some Excel spreadsheet somewhere doesn’t mean a physical train or power plant has actually been created. If permitting holds up the process for years, then you still haven’t built a damn thing. And if eventually construction does begin, but the cost balloons to absurd levels, that means that a pitifully inadequate amount of actual physical transit, or housing, or solar will be created, despite that huge flood of dollar signs in your spreadsheet.”
This is all very true, but Smith then fails to identify why the Democratic Party is the culprit in refusing to relax the regulatory burdens that are holding back economic growth. After all, it is not Republicans who are preventing reform of NEPA and other federal laws that are making construction so expensive. It's the Democrats.
The problem Democrats have in rolling back regulations, particularly environmental regulations, appears to come from the fastest-growing segment of their political coalition: Single Woke Females.
As the percentage of married households in America has dropped to an all-time low, unmarried women have not only grown in numbers but also become much more liberal than in past generations. In the most recent election, married women voted for Republican candidates, 56% to 42%. Unmarried women voted even more overwhelmingly for Democrats, 68%-31%.
Women are particularly more likely to value environmental protection over economic growth. One recent poll found that while two-thirds of college-educated respondents said it was more important to prioritize protecting the environment, even at the cost of slower economic growth, more than half of men without college degrees thought that economic growth was more important.
Until Democrats can convince Single Woke Females that building things is more important than maintaining the status quo, or until Republicans win more federal elections, expect the cost of much-needed new infrastructure to keep going higher.