According to some members of the political class, more and more things now qualify as infrastructure. "Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure," tweeted Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) recently. By that definition, this redesigned newsletter may count as infrastructure as well.

But Glenn Hubbard disagrees. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal this week, he writes that despite recent claims, true infrastructure programs focus on investment, not consumption, with the goal of increasing future productivity and national wealth. As it stands now, the Joe Biden administration's proposed American Jobs Plan doesn't do this. Worse, Hubbard argues, if passed, it will actually make future attempts to invest in the nation's infrastructure more difficult.

The good news is Congress is still debating the bill. As it does so, however, Congress may find itself hampered by what Yuval Levin calls our "strange dearth of intra-party factions." This isn't to say the Republicans and Democrats are not internally divided; they certainly are. But within both parties, Levin writes, every competing group feels compelled to claim the mantle of the entire organization, rather than understand themselves as negotiating members of a larger coalition. This can cause problems, because when parties become too unwieldy to pursue a common purpose, internal factions can provide one. They put new ideas on the table and take concerted action to promote their adoption — a useful practice for improving any public policy, be it infrastructure or whatever comes next.

Countering China's military challenge might prove to be the most important test. In Defense One, Eric Sayers and Abe Denmark warn that over the past year, Beijing has escalated its use of coercion and aggression in areas of significant American interest in the western Pacific. Focusing primarily on the threat China may pose in the 2030s is thus not enough: Congress and the White House must work in concert to deter the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of 2025 in addition to the PLA of future decades. The immediate goal, Sayers argues, should be investing in what the 2018 National Defense Strategy called "blunt" forces — those that can quickly delay, degrade, and deny an enemy's efforts, raising costs early in any conflict and therefore deterring Chinese aggression.

Finally, writing in The Dispatch, Scott Winship turns his attention to an American Compass report purporting to show income inequality is at its highest point in nearly 75 years. The problem with this conclusion is it relies on Census Bureau data that miss substantial amounts of income and redistribution. Using Winship's more comprehensive measures, inequality in disposable income seems not to have risen noticeably over the past 30 years. This misunderstanding is emblematic of a larger issue. As Winship describes, a lot of recent policy work coming from the right and left has been too quick to overstate how bad conditions are to advance greater government involvement in economic affairs. But faulty assumptions lead to faulty solutions, and before addressing a problem, we should be sure we understand it correctly.

Thank you for your interest in AEI's work, and we'll see you next weekend.