Trump's Failed Infrastructure Plan Is a Wasted Opportunity
"Well, Trump called for infrastructure meeting at the WH with Schumer and Pelosi,..."
Ok, so one infrastructure 'died-on-the-vine' moment was that time when Trump turned up unprepared for a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer, threw a hissy fitm and then walked in his usual 'couldn't-give-hoot', calm manner.
The president's trillion-dollar proposal could have been a signature achievement.
October 2018
A "Road Closed" sign under a highway overpass. (Shutterstock)
By Donald F. Kettl | Columnist Sid Richardson Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin
To get to her home in Washington County, Miss., where many of the bridges have been closed by the state and declared structurally deficient, Lori Gower has to maneuver her Dodge Charger through farm fields. Once, after heavy rains, the engine flooded and her husband Mack had to come out to rescue her. Mack has his own road-related problems, as NBC News has reported. He’s diabetic and can’t get his insulin delivered.
The Gower family is an icon for President Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure pledge. The roads and bridges around them are crumbling. The Gowers live deep in the heart of Trump country, where voters went for him by a margin of 2 to 1. But the prospects for a big infrastructure program that could help with their real-life problems are becoming more distant every month.
The irony is that this is the one part of Trump’s presidential agenda that looked like a sure bet. In the first hours after his victory, he announced that his administration was going to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” Bipartisan support was almost immediate. Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, quickly jumped on board.
The need is indeed enormous. The American Society of Civil Engineers has graded the nation’s infrastructure as a D+ and warned that its deterioration is harming the nation’s ability to compete in the global economy. In the early days after Trump’s inauguration, Republican strategist Steve Bannon predicted that infrastructure would give the president an added bonus, the key to “an entirely new political movement, as exciting as the 1930s,” even “greater than the Reagan revolution.” It was such a good idea, the White House believed, that Trump’s team boosted the target to $1.5 trillion.
But nearly two years after the election, the plan is by all reports dead. Everyone seems to love the idea of investment in infrastructure, but no one has figured out how to pay for it.
Early in the debate, Trump’s advisers suggested they could link the infrastructure program to the 2017 tax bill, extracting revenue from corporations that parked their earnings abroad. Corporate opposition killed that. Then there was a quiet plan to increase the gas tax or phase out some costly tax breaks. It turned out that there wasn’t the stomach in the White House for either of those ideas.
The Trump administration finally launched its $1.5 trillion plan with a pledge of just $200 billion in federal cash, to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget and supplemented through public-private partnerships. State and local officials across the country couldn’t have been more disappointed. They didn’t have that much cash to put into infrastructure projects -- if they had, they would already have been doing them. The promise of a big federal aid program suddenly had turned into a burdensome expense they’d have to meet on their own. Analysts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the president’s alma mater, calculated that the $200 billion White House infusion might not even produce $200 billion in new investment, because state and local governments might simply decide to put the money into existing programs.
That left public-private partnerships as the best option. That seemed a reasonable plan. Many European countries have enjoyed success with such ventures, and with interest rates near zero over the past decade, the costs were at historic lows. But in St. Louis, for example, a deal to turn the airport over to private operators has been bogged down due to the complexity of working out such partnerships, and because local voters are opposed to total privatization, preferring to keep some control over such a big local resource. The controversy has scared off some investors, who are squeamish about navigating turbulent governmental waters when other bets offer better -- and much faster -- returns.
Even where public-private partnerships have produced pavement, the results have raised questions. A new 10-mile stretch of interstate highway outside Washington, D.C., built with private funds, has seen congestion-based tolls hit $47.25 during rush hour, causing drivers’ jaws to drop. Even then, the overall speed on the highway hasn’t improved much. And a P3 toll road in Austin, Texas, designed to take traffic off the city’s congested Interstate 35, has generated only a third of the volume that a study projected. Texans, it turns out, just don’t like to pay tolls.
So what looked like the one can’t-miss deal of the Trump administration has gotten stuck in a deep rut. With budget deficits ballooning and interest rates rising, the odds of getting out aren’t improving.
According to some estimates, half of the American population in 20 years will live in just eight states. The fast-growing states won’t be able to build infrastructure quickly enough to accommodate all those people. Many of the other states will be bleeding population and won’t have the tax base to fix their infrastructure.
The failure of Trump’s infrastructure deal isn’t just the loss of Bannon’s Roosevelt-Reagan vision. It might well be the collapse of the best chance the country has had in a very long time to do what has to be done. Meanwhile, the going will only get tougher.
As you know - Trump is a policy simpleton, but he’s a shrewd survivor
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) outside the White House on April 29, after their meeting with President Trump to discuss infrastructure funding. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
By Ronald A. Klain Contributing columnist
May 5
President Trump may be simple-minded about policy, but he is sharp when it comes to survival. If Democrats aren’t careful, they are going to step into a trap in the infrastructure negotiations that the president is hoping will bolster his reelection prospects.
Democrats began talks with Trump on infrastructure .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/30/trump-democrats-apparently-have-an-infrastructure-deal-consider-us-skeptical/?utm_term=.5b35c3c44631 .. to position themselves as focused on getting business done and not all investigations all the time. They consider it low-risk, because they don’t think the president can come to an agreement on a package. But the mere fact that they are at the table with Trump hands him a tactical gain: He promised an infrastructure bill during the 2016 campaign but, because of internal GOP divisions, has never put one forward. Thus, instead of leaving the blame for inaction on Trump’s shoulders, the new negotiations opened the door for a blame game: Democrats may turn Trump’s unilateral failure to produce a plan into a joint failure to produce a bill.
But even worse, Democrats may be wrong in their assumption that Trump will not ultimately agree to the $2?trillion infrastructure package that was promised in last week’s White House meeting. ADVERTISING
While they are right to assume that the president will never (as the Democrats urged) raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for infrastructure, they should not assume that Trump won’t outrage his own budget officials by proposing a $2?trillion deficit-funded infrastructure plan. Why? Because Trump has never cared about deficits — which have soared on his watch .. https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/politics/budget-deficit-trump-administration/index.html— and his entire career has been based on the strategy of making promises with borrowed money. With the 2020 election approaching, Trump would love to pour trillions into the economy to juice the country’s gross domestic product. Trump has already broken every economic-policy norm by pounding on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/01/trump-wants-big-fed-rate-cut-lift-growth-experts-wary/3640145002/ .. in an effort to goose short-term growth; why shouldn’t we expect him to spike spending? Trump will do anything to keep the economy humming through 2020, and a giant infrastructure stimulus would do that.
Would it be good policy? A huge investment in infrastructure is desperately needed, and virtually every Democratic candidate for president is calling for one. But in Trump’s hands, such a program would be dangerous in three respects.
Second, Trump will likely use any infrastructure package to fracture the delicate Democratic labor-environmental coalition. He will insist on “project accelerating” provisions that vitiate critical environmental reviews. He will boost road funding and slash funding for mass transit. And he will make Democratic leaders choose between provisions backed by labor and safeguards demanded by environmentalists. As always with Trump, his real goal will be sowing chaos among his opponents.
And finally, if the giant infrastructure stimulus gets Trump reelected, then the deficit spending it causes will become a sword in the hand .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/blowing-up-the-deficit-is-part-of-the-plan/548720/ .. for second-term conservatives to cut programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.Trump’s tea party allies will run the David Stockman playbook and use soaring deficits as an excuse to slash social spending. Democrats who hand Trump an unfunded infrastructure plan could end up arming his minions with an ax to chop up everything else they hold dear.
What should Democrats do? They should demand that Trump honor his own words. In October 2016, at Gettysburg, Pa., Trump promised in a “contract” with the American people .. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1610/22/cnr.03.html .. that he would, if he won, “introduce ... and fight for ... passage within the first 100 days of my administration ... $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over the next 10 years.” We are nearing day 850 of the Trump presidency. It is still his move.
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