The phrase, “good-paying jobs,” seems to reverberate throughout the entirety of President Joe Biden’s industrial policy.
With each federally funded project, the White House thinks it can create the infrastructure needed to provide, in abundance, such critical outputs as high-speed internet, clean drinking water, or cutting-edge semiconductors.
At the same time, they claim these projects will create jobs with salaries that pay well above market rates. This ignores, however, the harsh realities of tradeoffs and opportunity costs. While this may be evident to anybody who understands basic economics, the problem appears entirely foreign to the president. Siphoning dollars from finite federal grants to compensate workers at artificially high rates will necessarily shrink the output of the Biden administration’s infrastructure projects.
The Department of Labor (DOL) has doubled down on the administration’s profligate, pro-union agenda. In August, it revised the regulations governing the Davis-Bacon Act (DBA), a 1931 statute that guarantees wages and fringe benefits that equate to “prevailing” local compensation rates to contractors who work on most federally funded projects. Fortunately, however, Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Lloyd Smucker has introduced a resolution under the Congressional Review Act to block Biden’s pro-union pandering.
“The Davis-Bacon Act and now more than 70 active Related Acts collectively apply to an........