Tucker Carlson: $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending should mean better roads, but it doesn't

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Tucker: What are we getting for $1.2 trillion?

Tucker Carlson investigates what Democrats consider as 'infrastructure.'

Think back, you may remember Joe Biden's infrastructure bill this fall. That bill emerged from Congress in November with a price tag of $1.2 trillion dollars. That so many zeros it's hard to imagine. How much is it? It's more than the entire GDP of the Nation of Mexico, one of the world's biggest oil producers, by the way. So that's a ton of money. 

So for a bill that size, you would expect, well, big results. You'd certainly want better roads than they've got in Mexico. So we're getting those what are we getting exactly from that bill? Well, today the Transportation Department, which is now run by Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, finally told us the answer. Effective immediately, we learned this country will undergo a "paradigm shift" in the way we think about infrastructure. 

Now, hold on a minute. As you probably noticed by this point, the moment paradigms start shifting, you can be certain a whole lot of people are about to get shafted. Nothing personal. It's just the nature of paradigms. They don't just shift. They tend to topple over and crush innocent bystanders. And this paradigm, of course, is no different. 

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According to the new paradigm we learned about today, infrastructure is no longer about roads and bridges and airports and train stations and things you might actually use in the course of your life. We could fix those things, but why bother? Mayor Pete has better ideas. Here's Mr. Douglas Emhoff, the profoundly unemployed husband of Kamala Harris, to explain. 

EMHOFF: So when we talk about transportation, we're not just talking about buildings and roads and bridges, all that important stuff as well, but we're talking about the safety of our children, the safety of our families. And this, as you know, it's something that President Biden, Vice President Harris, Secretary, put a judge this entire Department of Transportation, this administration deeply understands.

It deeply understands. We're not just talking about things you care about anymore. Mr. and Mrs. America, those stupid buildings and roads and bridges, things that you can touch. We're talking about bigger things now. We're talking about vast structural problems, problems so big that unemployed Doug Emhoff can't even really describe them, much less solve them. Things like "the safety of our children" and our families. 

Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff. (Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

Turns out, big problems are a lot safer to talk about in speeches because you can't actually do anything about them. So there are no expectations. Roads and bridges and buildings are very different from that. They need concrete and asphalt and rebar - stuff that's expensive and hard to do. And that may be why our buildings, roads and bridges are falling apart. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which keeps track of these things, there are more than 617,000 bridges in this country, and as of tonight, more than 46,000 of those bridges are considered "structurally deficient." That means they're in terrible shape. Kind of a big deal for a bridge. 

As for our roads, fully 43% of all public roadways in this country are "in poor or mediocre condition." In other words, we actually are Mexico, though a lot richer. 

So what are we going to do about this? What is the $1.2 trillion dollar plan going to do for our crumbling infrastructure? Well, Pete Buttigieg has a plan. Here it is: More speed cameras, according to The Associated Press, Pete Buttigieg would like to quote promote greater use of speed cameras, which the department says could provide more equitable enforcement than police traffic stops. 

Got that? So because of equity, you're about to get a lot more speeding tickets from robots. See how that works? Shut up, racist, pay the fine. The government does need the money for infrastructure even after $1.2 trillion. 

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A recent New York Times piece put it this way: "When California voters approved a bond in 2008 for a High-Speed rail system from L.A. to San Francisco, the project was supposed to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. That job is now projected to finish in 2033 for $100 billion, though those estimates are dated and there is an $80 billion funding gap." 

So infrastructure is expensive. Actually, no one really knows how much infrastructure costs because infrastructure never gets completed. There are still working trains in the state of California. Unfortunately, they're now getting robbed just like they were in the 1870s. Return to the future. 

Union Pacific is now contemplating abandoning the state after more than 150 years there. Kind of a big deal. What does Mayor Pete think of this? He's the transportation secretary. Hasn't said a single word about it. Of course, there's nothing to do with equity. So it's beneath his radar. 

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By the way, it's not just trains that are in trouble in this country. We're also short 80,000 truck drivers. And that could be part of the reason that these shelves at your local grocery store are getting bare. And it's not just trucks, either. By next year, airlines are expected to be short more than 10,000 pilots. And that's why between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, airlines canceled more than 10,000 flights. That was this year. Good luck getting to Florida next year. 

Now, there are other causes of the cancelations, none of which Mayor Pete is doing anything to fix. He's for vaccine mandates, of course, that was a huge cause of the shortage this year. And then there are others. 

So the president of Emirates, probably the best airline in the world, a man called Tim Clark, recently slammed Mayor Pete and the administration for the disastrous rollout of 5G technology in your airports, which led to a total suspension of Emirates flights. Clark said it was, "one of the most delinquent, utterly irresponsible decisions he's ever seen in his long career." Fox's Casey Stegall has covered the collapse of the transportation network in this nation. Here's an overview:

STEGALL: More chaos for folks trying to get home after the holidays. 

TRAVELER: I've been here since last night, yeah, so they canceled and now I'm getting a flight with the United hopefully leaving this afternoon. 

STEGALL: Airlines canceling thousands of flights on Tuesday and delaying thousands more, leaving anxious passengers stranded and frustrated at airports around the country. The widespread grounding and delays due to a combination of winter weather and COVID-19 staffing disruptions on flights and also around airports. The winter weather not only affecting air travel drivers also facing traffic snags due to snow and icy roads. Hundreds stranded overnight on a 50 mile stretch of I-95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Things were bad in Virginia. But it's not just Virginia. Officials in Connecticut, recently reported 285 car crashes because of "icy weather." Oh, forgot to salt the roads. 

Same in New York state. Westchester County. People killed? Oh, forgot to salt the roads. The feds didn't salt the roads. People died. What does that do with equity? 

So here you have roads you can't drive on, airports that don't work, planes that don't take off and trains that are getting robbed. These are not small things. When your transportation network falls apart in a continental country, things grind to a halt. Everything depends upon moving objects and people from one place to another, because it's a huge country. 

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So, if you have problems like these which are central to our economy and the way we live to the country itself, it might be a good idea to hire a competent transportation secretary. But that's not what the Biden administration did. They had a more progressive idea. 

Joe Biden hired a kid, by contrast, who had never had a real job outside McKinsey and no grounding of any kind in physical reality. We know this because he was the mayor of South Bend. 

So what's the infrastructure like in South Bend when Pete Buttigieg was mayor? The city had "the worst pothole situation in the state," according to the local paper. Huge potholes. So big that Mayor Pete, not a tall man, could have disappeared into one. Picture his little legs up in the air. Eight years as mayor, and he was never able to fix it.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: With just enough resources to replenish the paving of every lane mile of street in our city only every 100 years or so. I faced a constant battle with that natural enemy of all mayors: The pothole.

So a guy who literally couldn't fix the potholes in South Bend, Indiana, is now the transportation secretary. But he breastfeeds, so it's equity. It's unbelievable. Pretty amusing. This is a guy who wouldn't know a car transmission from a bridge abutment. What are the chances he can run his own espresso machine? 

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The mindset is the problem here, and it's not just Mayor Pete, he's easy to mock because he's a ludicrous figure. But it's all the people like him who believe our economy is based on social media apps and H.R. departments. People like that really believe that by social engineering, you can make the trains run on time and you can create a robust economy. Because they're morons. 

For example, last week. Mayor Pete explained that the number one priority of the transportation department in the middle of a massive shortage of transportation workers - trains are getting robbed, planes that won't take off - is equity. 

So you know what we need to do? We need to work extra hard to screen out anybody who might be working in our transportation industry who happens to have the wrong skin color.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: You look at something like the investment in transit, you know, it's Americans of color, commuters of color who are most likely to depend on that. You look at the jobs we're going to create and yeah, they have been traditionally White and male, but it doesn't have to stay that way. We were working with a lot of focus at the direction of the president to make sure that everything from the contracting opportunities for small business to the labor opportunities for workers - fixing the bridges, installing the electric vehicle charging stations are more likely to be workers of color are more likely to be women. 

So that's kind of the problem, and that's been the problem with our trains and planes and automobiles for a century now. Too many White people in them. Got a lot of White airline pilots. That's the problem. Mayor Pete just said that. It doesn't have to be this way. That's equity. 

So this is where you're $1.2 trillion dollars is going. To what is - not to get technical – an illegal campaign to hire workers on the basis of their skin color. So, Mayor Pete, you may have noticed is the wrong skin color. And as long as you want to diversify and equity transportation, why is he running the department? Because he's too important to give up his job to an unqualified Haitian migrant. That's because Mayor Pete can see the big picture. He understands every transportation decision is in fact, something so much bigger.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: Let me take 50 seconds to walk through our top priorities, and then let's just jump in the conversation. So our focus is on safety, of course, that's why our department exists. It is on economic development and the ways a good infrastructure create jobs. It is on equity in the knowledge that we can either do harm or do enormous good in terms of who gets the opportunities we create and where they go. It is about climate, recognizing that every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge that or not. 

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We couldn't understand everything, he said, because for some reason he had a freaking mask on his face. Maybe he was robbing a train. Not clear. We've got a reporter getting to the bottom of that. But we think he said his job is to work on climate. It's funny. When the country applauded $1.2 trillion going to fixing the roads, bridges and buildings, a lot of us were dumb enough to think that's what might actually happen. 

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the January 27, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."