Construction on the Howard Frankland Bridge in Tampa, Fla., June 3.

Construction on the Howard Frankland Bridge in Tampa, Fla., June 3.

Photo: Luis Santana/Zuma Press

Tax reform was a signature achievement of President Trump’s tenure. Before the pandemic, it helped fuel robust economic growth, leading to record low unemployment, higher wages, and the lowest poverty rate since the metric was established in 1959. Eliminating the 2017 reforms and imposing massive new tax hikes to fund huge spending increases for social programs will lead to even higher inflation, hurt working families, and disrupt our economic recovery.

This spring, Democrats used a special budget process to pass a purely partisan $1.9 trillion “pandemic relief” bill. And now, with the country already feeling the inflationary effects of this stimulus, they plan to use this same partisan budget process to pass another reckless tax and spending bill of at least $3.5 trillion that would further stall economic growth.

What isn’t partisan, however, is an entirely separate legislative initiative to invest long-term in the nation’s infrastructure. We can all agree that America’s roads, bridges, rails and ports need repair, and that without more investment in these long-term, hard assets, and the digital infrastructure needed to expand high-speed internet, we will continue to fall behind other countries. As a percentage of its economy, China spends nearly four times what the U.S. spends on infrastructure.

Presidents Obama and Trump advocated robust programs to invest in infrastructure. Neither succeeded because of partisan disagreements on how to pay for it.

When the Biden administration turned its attention to infrastructure earlier this year, it proposed a $2.65 trillion “infrastructure” bill with destructive tax increases and billions in spending unrelated to core infrastructure. I joined Republican colleagues in strongly opposing the bill. I knew that the same special budget process that was used to pass the $1.9 trillion relief package could be used to jam the infrastructure bill through without a single Republican vote.

Instead of simply opposing the $2.65 trillion proposal, a bipartisan group of senators said we could support a real infrastructure bill as long as three criteria were met. First, that the legislation covered only core infrastructure, not all of the so-called human infrastructure in the $2.65 trillion Biden proposal. That bill would cost $550 billion.

Second, we committed not to raise taxes to pay for the needed infrastructure investments. Instead of the largest tax increase in U.S. history, which the Biden approach would have delivered, we agreed to no tax hikes.

Finally, we agreed to make it a truly bipartisan process, building the vote from the middle out. The result is the new Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which will make a long-awaited and historic investment in the nation’s infrastructure.

Notably, our legislation includes substantive reforms to the permitting process for the nation’s largest infrastructure projects. Despite issuing helpful executive orders regarding permitting, President Trump wasn’t able to secure any legislative victories on this issue even when Republicans had full control of the House and Senate. Our framework contains important permitting reforms, such as making permanent Title 41 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, known as FAST-41. Since becoming law in 2015, the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council created by FAST-41 has helped more than 50 projects save more than a billion dollars combined, created more than 100,000 jobs, and sped up permitting process substantially.

Just as important, according to a Penn Wharton study, the long-term spending from this infrastructure plan will improve economic efficiency and productivity while raising gross domestic product and government revenue.

A separate Penn Wharton study found that “an increase in public infrastructure by itself raises the productivity of private capital, as public capital is a complement to private capital.” The study’s authors noted that an increase in private capital “increases the productivity of labor and leads to higher wages and lower interest rates (borrowing costs), encouraging additional work and motivating higher investment in private capital.”

During the debate over the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion spending bill, some of us warned that increased stimulus spending would lead to an overheated economy and inflation. Unfortunately, those fears have been realized.

As economist Michael Strain wrote last week: “There are good reasons to believe this bipartisan infrastructure spending won’t be inflationary. Its focus is on improving longer-term productivity, not near-term demand. By strengthening the supply side of the economy, it would ease inflationary pressures. In addition, the spending would be spread out over a decade.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum agreed. “Improving roads, bridges, and ports would make it less costly for businesses to operate, allowing them to increase their output per hour, and putting downward pressure on consumer prices,” he wrote. “In addition to boosting productivity, the timing of the proposed infrastructure plans mitigates concern about inflation.”

The Democrats’ coming partisan tax and spending spree must be opposed, but infrastructure is different. As Republicans, we can and should be for common-sense solutions to the most pressing needs working families face every day. This bipartisan effort to improve U.S. infrastructure helps address those needs, and is worthy of our support.

Mr. Portman, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Ohio.

Wonder Land: Behold the Democrats and GOP locked in a deadly tango over Biden’s $4 trillion. Images: De Agostini via Getty Images The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition