H.B. 5356: A Bill To Establish A

National Infrastructure Bank

(Part One)

Not yet dressed for the day, I was sitting out on our backyard patio absorbing the first vitalizing motions of Chi (the Chines concept of "breath," which Leibniz, the inventor of Calculus, considered "Enlightenment") of Autumn.

After another typically hot, dry western Plains' summer, it was rainy and cool. A perfect day to have an idea, and I did.

What if, I wondered, I could keep my brain and have any body I wanted for the next thousand years, or so? Temporal immortality. What if? How would that affect what I did with my day today? Would I just lie around on the couch with a beer watching reruns of the last Packers' win before their miserable performance last Sunday against the Browns? Or would I try to be productive, which, to me, meant pulling your boots up in the morning and getting to work on time.

First off, just as I'd once considered death inevitable, in Chi, I knew that, inevitably, I was to going to experience, personally, empirically and not in a theoretical afterlife, the long-term consequences of what I did with my day today.

Let's ignore temporal immortality and just say that I knew, for sure, that I was going to be around for at least another hundred years (both my folks are in their mid-90s, and science being what it is...). Depending on what I did today, I might be living in a nice house with a backyard patio, or in a rundown shack. If I didn’t make time today to keep the place up, I knew where I’d be ­— an outcast in the neighborhood, bringing everybody’s property values down.

I went back into the house and to my office downstairs, the World Headquarters of Westphalia Publishing. Culley Jane was out taking a walk in the park. I’d drunk too much whiskey the night before and was experiencing the unpleasant consequences. The house was as quiet as our cats. Instead of just sitting around like an old widow with no place to go and no time to be there, I decided to go to work. I thought about patching up some loose boards in the backyard fence, but then decided to call a young guy who’s the campaign manager for a city council candidate here in Aurora, Colorado.

I had met him once before, a few months back when I had coffee at a café with the city council candidate to hear what he had to say. There were four of us all seated around a sidewalk table — Culley Jane and me and the candidate and his campaign manager.

Naturally, the issue of potholes came up. Every candidate for every city council seat in every town in America has to address the potholes issue. And almost all of them respond by invoking the orthodox definition of economics, first put together at the London School of Economics in the early 1930s, just as the world was drifting into the 20^th century’s Great Depression. “Economics,” said the English dons, “is the science of choice in a world of limited resources.”

The candidate shrugged his shoulders in frustration. The city had everything it needed to fix all the potholes to the public’s satisfaction — dump trucks, blacktop, shovels, rakes and people willing to do the job. Everything except enough money in the budget to pay for it all.

The public wanted police and fire protection, too, and parks and recreation centers and water for flush toilets. But somebody's reality was a world of limited resources where we had to choose. “We can’t do it all,” the candidate said.

“It’s bullshit,” I said, which caught his attention because reporters aren’t supposed to talk and act that way. But we're Westphalia Publishing and still free.

I asked him if he was familiar with the effort to establish a National Infrastructure Bank. We could patch all the potholes in the city and across the land and do so much more — fix up the place so we didn’t have to wind up living in a shack.

“Five trillion dollars,” I said. “That would be the bank’s initial capitalization, fractional reserves for hundreds of trillions of dollars to fix things up — new levees along the Mississippi to better protect the towns there from the ravages of spring floods; a canal from Alaska to water the deserts of the vast American West. Hundreds of thousands of miles of underground pipes are getting old. Bridges over rivers will eventually just fall down if we ignore our physical infrastructure,” I said, and then looked around to see if I was making a scene. I was relieved. The candidate’s look was like “tell me more.”

“We’ve done it before,” I went on, enthusiastically. “It’s basically what Hamilton did after the Revolution, Lincoln’s Greenbacks, FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation… Kennedy was moving in that direction when he was killed…” I tumbled on… “I don’t really understand finance, but I guess it’s doable. The effort is being led by a woman who was a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund and maybe one day it just dawned on her that money did not have to be a limited resource. A bill to establish a National Infrastructure Bank has been introduced in Congress… H.B. 5356. It’s got dozens of co-sponsors. I think it’s a big story. But hardly anybody knows about it. That’s because of where they get their news. It’s never been mentioned in the Denver Post as far as I know.”

I was on a roll but then remembered that I was there to interview a candidate for the town’s city council.

The candidate looked at me like he could see that I was trying to be helpful.

I asked, like it was a legitimate question to ask any candidate for a public office in our Constitutional Republic: “Have you ever heard about it, about a National Infrastructure Bank?”

He nodded in the direction of the younger guy at the table sitting next to him, his campaign manager. “He has,” he said.

Before splitting up, I got the campaign manager’s business card and said I’d give him a call someday to talk about the National Infrastructure Bank and how he’d heard about it and what he thought.

So that’s what I decided to do the day I was sitting around thinking about temporal immortality… I’d call the campaign manager of a local city council race. Then after that maybe I’d take care of some loose boards in the backyard fence.

(to be continued…)