CPs to Solve Competitiveness/Economy/stem advanced Manufacturing Networks cp

Infrastructure CP Answers

2AC — Education Key

An educated workforce is the biggest internal link to competitiveness---our study prices in other important factors

Examining Indiana, we find that the state leads the nation in the share of employment in advanced manufacturing with at least one out of every 12 workers employed in this area. The growth in this cluster has likely provided the bulk of manufacturing employment growth in Indiana over the past decade. Importantly in terms of the industrial mix, Indiana enjoys strong diversification, suggesting that advanced manufacturing will be less sensitive to cyclical changes than most states.

2AC — Links to Spending

The CP can’t solve infrastructure issues or the economy without spending money – lifespan of infrastructure, technology, and regional differences

Marshall 17 (Aarian Marshall – Princeton University A.B., Religion/Religious Studies, Urban Studies, Berkeley Carroll School, Staff Writer WIRED; Article; 1/30/17; “HOW NOT TO SCREW UP SPENDING $1 TRILLION ON US INFRASTRUCTURE”; https://www.wired.com/2017/01/not-screw-spending-1-trillion-us-infrastructure/; accessed on 7/23/17) [DS]

WELCOME TO 2017, where it seems like the one thing elected leaders can maybe, perhaps, possibly agree on is that America's infrastructure is busted. That, and that the only way to spruce things up is by flinging a trillion dollars at the country's roads, waterways, and broadband networks. President Trump's team wants to do it by triggering private spending with $137 billion in tax credits; Senate Democrats have floated a plan based on direct investments. Whatever the answer, finding the money is but half the problem. Because man, oh man, is there a lot to do. From our tragically polluted pipes to packed airports, American infrastructure is, as the saying goes, a failing pile of garbage. The real question, then, is how to spend that (still very theoretical) avalanche of bipartisan cash. “Decision makers need to know exactly where to wisely invest those dollars so that we don't piss away $1 trillion on solving problems that don't exist or in areas that won't get you the biggest return,” says Michael Pack, who researches intelligent traffic systems at the University of Maryland. In the interest of keeping this discussion manageable, we'll set aside the cracked levees, overflowing landfills, broadband-free regions for now, and focus on crumbling bridges, potholed roads, and choking traffic. You know, the ground transportation stuff. Here's where to start, and where to go from there. Patchwork Step one: Repair. States must ditch the habit of spending more on building and widening new roads—things that, reminder, don’t necessarily help with traffic—than on fixing the ones they’ve already got. Between 2009 and 2011, according to Smart Growth America, states shelled out $20.4 billion on new stretches of asphalt and just $16.5 billion to maintain the other 99 percent of the system. You can see why: Cutting a ribbon on a new stretch of interstate makes for a way better press release than filling another pothole. But lord, is it dumb. Meanwhile, many of America’s mass transit systems are a tire fire (or track fire). Transit ridership is growing faster than the US population (thanks, millennials). A crap ton of rolling stock is past its intended lifespan and needs replacing: half of heavy rail cars, a third of commuter rail cars, and a fifth of transit buses. That shoddy, rusty infrastructure exacerbates overcrowding and delays, and it can also prove dangerous: A 2015 electrical malfunction on a stretch of Washington, DC, Metro track killed one and sent 70 to the hospital. Transit needs money for tinkering. Wiring It Up OK, but the country still definitely needs new things. And if it’s going to build them, it should consider the ways in which transportation is changing. “Any road or transit that you redo—even if you’re upgrading it—you ought to be using that opportunity to embed technologies,” says Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a DC think tank. That means sensors and cameras to identify and ultimately mitigate traffic congestion. Wires and cables to transmit data, onboard computers to track rail cars, smart traffic lights to sense and give priority to pedestrians and cyclists. Freshly-painted road stripes and signs to assist autonomous vehicles in figuring out where they are and how to maneuver. Electronic toll collection and maybe even infrastructure built to communicate with self-driving cars. Then there are the consumer-facing software and apps, ones that crunch the data and help people understand the fastest, healthiest, cheapest, most sustainable ways to get to where they want to go. “For a little bit of money, you could make this infrastructure intelligent,” says Atkinson, and though he means “a little bit” in big-money infrastructure terms, he’s not kidding. The US Government Accountability Office estimates rigging up the whole country with real-time traffic management system—to fight traffic, cut down travel times, reduce emissions, limit crashes, let officials coordinate during emergencies, and help agencies identify pain points and plan for the future—would cost just $1.2 billion. And it would save Americans $30.2 billion in economic, safety, and environmental costs in less than ten years. Wire ‘er up. Smarter Money OK, back to the getting money thing for a moment. $1 trillion sounds great, but it ain't enough, not if the country wants to keeping fixing roads ten years down the line. According a US Department of Transportation report, just maintaining current highways and bridges through 2030 will cost a cool $65.3 billion—per year. That’s being conservative. The good news is that the government doesn’t have to keep paying for our roads and bridges. “In the case of transportation, it’s pretty easy to not just charge the federal taxpayer, but the actual user,” says Genevieve Giuliano, a transportation policy researcher with the University of Southern California. The federal gas tax, which funds our federal transportation infrastructure, hasn’t been raised, or even adjusted for inflation, since 1993. Now, as vehicles become more fuel efficient and quit gas altogether, someone’s going to figure out how to pass the costs of wear and tear on to the people who are actually creating it. “Until someone says, ‘We the users should be paying for this system and here is the way we’ll do it,’ it won’t change,” says Giuliano. Economists have a few ideas: bill drivers by the number of miles they actually drive. (States like Oregon, California, and Colorado are taking this idea for an experimental spin.) Put in more toll roads. Or get heavy into congestion pricing, which adjusts fees based on how many people want to use the road at a given time. (Have you heard about this supply and demand thing?) These changes would be unpopular, and might get a few folks un-elected. But they're smart, necessary adaptions to a changing world. Power to the People Of course, it’s difficult for federal actors to direct all this from high atop their swamp. They shouldn’t try. Some of the smartest infrastructure planning and spending should and will happen at the local level—a departure from the top-down, interstate-driven infrastructure of the last century. "Each region has its own safety priorities," says Wassim Selman, who heads up the North American infrastructure division of the engineering firm Arcadis. For Washington, DC, more protected bike lanes. For rural Montana, a safer way to make left turns on big highway interchanges. In suburban Michigan, a bus rapid transit system. Send the check, and let the people figure it out.

They are wrong about infrastructure costs – it will cost 4.6 trillion dollars to fix U.S. Infrastructure which means they link to the Spending DA

Frank 17 (Thomas Frank – CNN Money journalist and staff writer; Article; 3/9/17; CNN; “Civil engineers say fixing infrastructure will take $4.6 trillion”; http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/09/news/infrastructure-report-card/index.html; accessed on 7/24/17) [DS]

President Trump's pledge to unleash $1 trillion in infrastructure spending is generating a flurry of lobbying from an alphabet-soup list of trade groups whose members are jockeying to reap potentially huge benefits. In the latest and most sweeping publicity effort, the nation's association of civil engineers said Thursday that the nation's roads, dams, airports and water and electrical systems need $4.6 trillion of work -- more than the entire federal government spends in a year. But that figure, from the American Society of Civil Engineers, is based on estimates that call for much more spending than what federal agencies and other trade groups have said is needed for infrastructure, CNN found. The discrepancies raise questions about the society's projections -- and its well-known Infrastructure Report Card, which grades the quality of 16 categories of infrastructure every four years. The White House cites the report card on its website. The overall infrastructure grade was a D+. Groups such as the engineers society have a clear interest in triggering as much public spending as possible to benefit their members. "It's not lost on me that they are the ones who are going to be building much of this infrastructure, so it's in their interest to talk down" the quality of infrastructure, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that monitors government spending. Society officials say the poor quality of U.S. infrastructure hampers economic growth and costs people thousands of dollars a year in extra travel time and car repairs from rutted streets. "When it comes to your infrastructure, you should be worried," society president Norma Jean Mattei said Thursday. Among the discrepancies CNN found: --The engineers society says roads and bridges need $2 trillion in improvements. The Federal Highway Administration says they need $836 billion. --The engineers society says drinking-water systems need $1 trillion over 25 years to maintain and expand service. The Environmental Protection Agency says they need $384 billion. --The engineers society says the 15,000 dams most in need of rehabilitation require $45 billion of rebuilding. The Association of State Dam Officials puts the price at less than half that. A spokeswoman for the engineers society, Lynn Badgley, said the estimates are based on a review of legislation, investment patterns and academic literature. She declined to address specific questions. The engineers are not alone in calling attention to infrastructure problems. An airports organization said Tuesday that $100 billion in infrastructure spending is needed over the next five years. That figure was included in the engineers society report, and represents a huge jump from the group's estimate of $76 billion two years ago. But the Federal Aviation Administration estimated in September that airports need just $32.5 billion in infrastructure spending over the next five years. The Airports Council International North America says its survey is "far more comprehensive" than the FAA report and includes projects that the FAA excluded, such as parking facilities and airplane hangars. Advocacy groups often have an expansive view of infrastructure needs and include in their assessments projects that both repair facilities and expand them, said Beth Osborne, a senior policy adviser at Transportation for America, a nonpartisan group that urges investment in transportation. Federal agencies typically assess only infrastructure that needs repair, said Osborne, a former assistant secretary at the Transportation Department. The engineers society has spent $12 million lobbying in Washington since 1999, federal reports show. The airports council spent $23 million in that period. Trump's infrastructure pledge has unleashed a groundswell of anticipation from other groups that have testified at recent hearings or written letters. They include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, FedEx, the American Water Works Association and BMW of North America. The National Association of Manufacturers recently released a report calling for $1.3 trillion more to be spent over 10 years on transportation infrastructure. "All the transportation groups get very excited when an administration talks about transportation," Osborne said. Trump has given few details of his infrastructure plan other than to say he will ask Congress to approve a measure that would enable $1 trillion in spending by both government agencies and the private sector. The engineers society said that was a good start. "With the administration, we've had some discussions about the need for investment in infrastructure. They are certainly aware of the report card," society Executive Director Thomas Smith said this morning. "It's been hard to pin down exactly a concrete plan. There's been a lot of focus on a lot of things." Democrats and Republicans in Congress broadly agree on the need to spend more money on infrastructure, though there is concern that private investors will not want to put their money in projects that may not generate a return. Ellis said advocacy groups have helped focus lawmakers on the need for infrastructure spending. But the bigger challenge is prioritizing which infrastructure projects to fund first. "It's not going to be happening all at once," Ellis said. "It's going to be about setting priorities on those investments." The engineers society suggested the federal government start by giving more money to well-established federal programs that fund infrastructure programs such as roads, water utilities and dams and levees.

2AC — Doesn’t Solve Economy

Infrastructure development destroys the economy through increased debt and economic fragility – China proves

Ansar et al 16 (Atif Ansar – Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and undertook his DPhil (PhD), at Brasenose College, with the prestigious Clarendon Scholarship from Oxford University Press. Atif was a post-doctoral Research Fellow from 2010-2013 with Professor Bent Flyvbjerg at the BT Centre for Major Programme Management at Saïd Business School, then from 2013-2015 he served as a Lecturer at the Blavatnik School of Government and Cohort Manager of the Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA); PDF; “Does infrastructure investment lead to economic growth or economic fragility? Evidence from China”; Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 32, Number 3, 2016, pp. 360–390; https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00415.pdf; accessed on 7/23/17) [DS]

The question of whether infrastructure investment leads to economic growth must be answered in the negative. Owing to uncertainty surrounding costs, time, and benefits parameters, a typical infrastructure project fails to deliver a positive risk-adjusted return. There is a common tendency for the benefit-to-cost ratio of major infrastructure investments to fall below 1.0. Such unproductive projects detract from economic prosperity. We thus reject the orthodox theory that heavy investment in infrastructure causes growth. There is an even more detrimental boomerang effect of overinvestment in infrastructure. Unproductive projects carry unintended pernicious macroeconomic consequences: sovereign debt overhang; unprecedented monetary expansion; and economic fragility. The primary findings from our datasets are as follows. – In line with global trends, in China actual infrastructure construction costs are on average 30.6 per cent higher than estimated costs, in real terms, measured from the final business case. The evidence is overwhelming that costs are systematically biased towards underestimation. In terms of absolute construction time and schedule overrun China performs better than rich democracies. In democracies politicians seem to have an incentive to over-promise and then under-deliver. China has built infrastructure at impressive speed in the past but, it appears, by trading off due consideration for quality, safety, social equity, and the environment. – With respect to traffic performance, demand in China represents two extremes. A majority of the routes witness paltry traffic volumes but a few routes are highly congested. Too little and too much traffic of this magnitude both indicate significant misallocation of resources. The pattern of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in China’s infrastructure investments is linked with China’s growing debt problem. We estimate that cost overruns have equalled approximately one-third of China’s US$28.2 trillion debt pile. China’s debt-to-GDP ratio now stands at 282 per cent, exceeding that of many advanced economies, such as the United States, and all developing economies for which data were available, such as Brazil, India, and Nigeria. Because many corporations and financial institutions in China are state-owned, our revised calculation of China’s implicit government debt as a proportion of GDP suggests that China’s is the second-most indebted government in the world. Extraordinary monetary expansion has accompanied China’s piling debts: China’s M2 broad money grew by US$12.9 trillion in 2007–13, greater than the rest of the world combined. The result is increased financial and economic fragility. We conclude that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, infrastructure investments do not typically lead to economic growth. Overinvesting in underperforming projects instead leads to economic and financial fragility. For China, we find that poorly managed infrastructure investments are a main explanation of surfacing economic and financial problems. We predict that, unless China shifts to a lower level of higher-quality infrastructure investments, the country is headed for an infrastructure-led national financial and economic crisis, which—due to China’s prominent role in the world economy—is likely to also become a crisis internationally. China is not a model to follow for other economies—emerging or developed—as regards infrastructure investing, but a model to avoid.

2AC — Environmental Regulations Good

Environmental regulations boost the economy through job creation, green tech, and preventing climate change effects

Li 16 (Hannah Li – Student writer for UPenn Public Policy Initative, *citing Noelle Swan who graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 2010, where she studied natural sciences, environmental management, and journalism, nationally award-winning journalist. She currently leads science, technology, and environment coverage at The Christian Science Monitor; Article; 11/8/16; “WHY ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION IS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY”; https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/1545-why-environmental-regulation-is-good-for-the; accessed on 7/24/17) [DS]

But does environmental regulation actually hurt the economy? There are compliance costs that businesses have to bear that can lead to higher prices, as well as job loss costs. In the first fifteen years after the implementation of the Clean Air Act in, about half a million jobs moved from counties with plants that were out of compliance to neighboring counties where the plants met the standards [3]. These job losses, however, have been insignificant on a macroeconomic level compared to the overall number of jobs lost, suggesting that environmental regulation encourages job mobility within countries. In fact, environmental regulation actually creates jobs by requiring prevention efforts and pollution clean up. An EPA-mandated clean up of the Chesapeake Bay is “anticipated to create 35 times as many jobs as the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline”, and “jobs in the coal industry actually increased by 10 percent after the EPA cracked down on mountaintop-removal mining in 2009” [4]. An independent, nonpartisan analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that net job gains from the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which was proposed by the EPA, would reach 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015 [4]. The economic, technological, and health benefits of environmental regulation greatly outweigh the costs. The costs of environmental regulation do not significantly change overall productivity, or GDP. A rule of thumb for comparing the two says “a 10% change in the oil price is associated with a 0.2% change in GDP” [5]. If green taxes, which are taxes on services or products that are not environmentally friendly, increase oil prices by only a few cents, then the impact on GDP would be minimal. The desire to comply with green rules and avoid paying green taxes would also encourage businesses to invest in innovations and efficiencies in green technology more than they would have otherwise, helping economies shift towards greener practices. Most importantly, environmental regulation saves the economy billions by preventing the negative health effects associated with pollution. Air and water pollution cause many illnesses, such as respiratory diseases, cancers, heart attacks, infections, poisonings, etc., that require billions in health care costs each year to treat. The estimated health benefits from the Clean Air Act are “two orders of magnitude greater than the employment costs of the policy” [6]. In monetary terms, the EPA has produced as much as $640 billion in benefits and only $45 billion in costs on the economy over the last decade [4]. However, monetary benefit cannot compare to health benefits: healthier and more productive citizens who are living longer. These citizens can go to work and contribute to society instead of receiving treatment for preventable illnesses caused by pollution. As for the environment as a whole, fewer species will go extinct from climate change and there would be fewer natural disasters, which also costs billions of dollars to clean up. The United States has made great strides towards being more environmentally friendly, so it would be devastating if Trump were to repeal environmental regulation or eliminate the EPA. Continuing to emit similar, or greater amounts, of pollution for the next four years would mean foggier skies, air that would be harder to breathe, increased human illnesses, contaminated water and food, and extinction of more and more species. Trump might not believe in climate change, but he is a businessman who would capitalize on a plan that saves or earns money. If science can’t convince him to support environmental regulation, then maybe economic gain will.

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