The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act carried a $1.2 trillion price tag and a noble-sounding name. Congress passed it in November 2021, Biden signed it, and the press celebrated. Roads, bridges, broadband. The whole sales pitch. What actually landed in the bill tells a different story. Genuine infrastructure spending, the kind that moves physical goods and connects people to markets, accounted for roughly $110 billion of that $1.2 trillion. Roads and bridges got $40 billion in new money. Passenger and freight rail received $66 billion. Broadband pulled another $65 billion. Add it up, and you are still well under 20% of the total, and the real figure for hard infrastructure sits closer to 10% once you strip out programs that would have passed in any normal appropriations cycle. The remaining $1.1 trillion went to things Congress rebranded as infrastructure. Workforce development, climate resilience programs, electric vehicle subsidies, community development block grants. This is how Washington operates. Take a word the public trusts, attach it to everything in the hopper, and dare anyone to vote against "roads and bridges." The label launders the spending. You pay for it through deficit financing that the Federal Reserve then monetizes, which erodes your purchasing power as reliably as a direct tax, just less visibly. No federal agency holds the information needed to allocate capital better than private investors who face actual profit and loss. Amtrak lost money on food service alone for thirty consecutive years before anyone noticed. The bill does not fix one pothole more efficiently because Amtrak now has $22 billion to spend. No government builds infrastructure. They pass the actual work to their connected cronies in the private sector, after taking their cut. At least we know Biden actually signed this in person.👇