Did Feminists Stop the ARRA From Having Infrastructure Funding? (SPOILER: No.)

It must be said that Glenn Harlan Reynolds identifies a real problem in his column today — namely, a lack of infrastructure spending and the resultant loss of working-class jobs. There are plenty of people you can blame from this fact. Most obviously, you must blame the Republicans who strongly oppose infrastructure spending and have used their control of key veto points to stop in from happening. You could talk about Republican governors who turned down federal infrastructure money because it would provide actually useful infrastructure rather than the ridiculously useless boondoggles he would prefer to waste state money on. On the ARRA specifically, you can blame the Republicans and conservative Democrats who used their vetoes to make the stimulus smaller and more tilted towards tax cuts than spending or state aid. Since Reynolds is both a Republican hack and a world-class concern troll, we can guess who he blames:

So if Democrats want to win back the white working class — and they kind of need to, if they want to win elections, because it’s an enormous demographic — maybe they need to start thinking about honoring and encouraging work, rather than talking about race or class. One person who has some ideas in this direction is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who suggests that the government invest heavily in infrastructure, which would create a lot of blue-collar jobs.

That was actually an original part of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, but it was derailed by feminists within the Obama coalition who thought it would produce too many jobs for men. Christina Romer, then-chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, reported: “The very first email I got … was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ “

The women did it! If you look at the linked piece, however, you’ll noticed that while feminist groups were (rightly!) concerned about gender equity in stimulus spending, they did not oppose infrastructure projects or get any stripped from the ARRA. Women’s groups wanted additions, not subtractions, and got them. The idea that women’s groups, rather than conservative Republicans, are the reason for the lack of infrastructure spending is risible bad faith even by Reynolds’s standards.

…feminism has been very busy lately; not only has it stopped infrastructure spending, it caused the Ferguson shooting.