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Brief Summary of Federal

This should be a fairly limited bills area for management the overall structures like highways, military, federal buildings, federal laws, and the like. However it has become the micro manager of all micro managers. They get involved in areas that no federal government should be involved in, and shift more power upward. This has led to each party trying to run over the other party in the eyes of the voters, all the while doing everything possible to maintain their power. They do this by holding onto all of the money, and claiming they know best how it should be spent. But they run debts so badly that no one should be looking to them as an example of anything other than the way to overspend and go further into debt.

Invest in America 2021 Summary

The appropriate large sums of money. The federal government should be funding highways, freight, military, federal buildings and land, federal salaries and benefits, paying down debt, social security and medicare. The federal government should not be making decisions regarding innercity or innerstate mass transit. Railroads are within their perview. However, I don't think we should continue to fund Amtrak. It has been loosing money since it was initially established, and something that could not exist but for federal funding is not a private entity. There are other options for moving items across country, and ones that are actually better environmentally. But nonetheless, Congress is pushing funding for mass transit because they want to move away from single use vehicles to mass transit, bicycling and walking.

Some of this is for the freight and highway trust fund. There are numerous areas addressing mass transit grants and funding. They are also doing a great many studies in this bill. Interestingly some which were done within the past 3 years are being redone now. I suppose they did not like the recommendations so they are going to do it again and hope they hear what they want to hear.

They want to push for charging stations and fund putting them in across the country. They never did this with gas stations, yet they were done. And charging stations are being put in place. Sadly they are pushing fast charging, which is the opposite of being enviromentally friendly. I'm not convinced that electric vehicles are the way to go yet. First the lithium batteries are not truly being fully recycled and there is a limited supply. It sounds like a lot, but there are a lot of vehicles that would have to be replaced if there were a push to all electric. Plus I'm not 100% certain the means of getting the lithium is not some how harmful environmentally. And I've yet to see the fact that electric vehicles are heavier than the same gasoline powered engines being addressed. We currently have failing infrastructure. Infrastructure that is very expensive to maintain and every time it has to be redone, affects the environment and materials being used. All of those heavier vehicles will cause faster wear and tear on the roadways, creating more work to be done with heavy equipment, using more materials. The cycle is vicious, yet I'm not seeing it truly addressed. It has been mentioned in passing at best. A based comparison is an electric F150 weighs 1,600 pounds more than it's gasoline powered version. Minimum weight is shown at 4,000 lbs for a gas powered version.

They want to do a study on the safety of transporting lithium batteries by air travel, and while it's being done lithium batteries may be transported by air. They also want a study into the transporting of liquified natural gas by rail. While they are doing the study no liquified natural gas may be transported by rail. There was a study done in 2021 that showed that it was safe and Japan has been doing this for 20 years without incident. But we should stop doing it and perhaps find another way to transport the LNG because Congress disliked the prior study which included data from Japan.

This bill is looking at potentially adding a lot of items to new cars, and some of them retroactively to older vehicles. One of these is the unattended occupant feature. There were 25 child deaths in 2020 that were either inside or near a vehicle. And there are already a multitude of things that can be added to a vehicle to help ensure a child is not left unattended in a vehicle. This is one that way to retroactivel add to older vehicles, because you should pay to add this even if you have no children and are past child-bearing years. Read on for more items to increase the price of vehicles. I guess this will move them closer to forcing the masses to use mass transit.

They want to address safe water, including a study into flushable wipes. So of course they intend to pay for a study into this issue. Interestingly, there have already been studies done in this area. This includes one from NY where they determined that less than 4% of issues were caused by them.

They intend to have a Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator. They call it a private entity but in reality it is a way to ensure that whoever is in charge is funding the energy industry they prefer. This will lead to limitations of funding in some energy areas, and drive costs to consumers up. In the end you will pay more and energy may become a limited item in the future.

Blogs About Invest in America 2021

J.B. Williams, J.D. has published 5 blogs on this subtopic. The 2 most recent blogs are summarized in the following sections. A table at the bottom of the page lists the remaining blogs for this subtopic in chronological order from newest to oldest.

Clean Energy, including Electric Vehicles

Published: 2021-12-10
Outdoor and Wildlife issues are addressed here. Community resilience is addressed because some how the state would be lost without the federal government managing it.

Water Quality and Jobs Creation

Published: 2021-12-02
Jobs creation here is just a let's create more bureaucracy that we have to continue to pay for that we cannot afford. This portion mostly goes to safe drinking water.

Other Blogs For This Subtopic

Blog Date	Blog Headline
2021-11-29	Hazardous Materials, Rail, and Auto Safety
2021-10-26	Studies galore along with items not really actual infrastructure based
2021-09-09	Federal Surface Transportation for 2022

Legislative Blog

J.B. Williams, J.D.