A report out Tuesday from the nonprofit think tank Demos suggests that the president’s plan to make America’s crumbling infrastructure more resilient would not only be ineffective, but would actually be disastrous for our economy.
“This proposal, like Trump’s first attempt at infrastructure investment, would not be a win for the American economy,” the report found.
“It would be a loss for taxpayers, who would have to pick up the tab for the $7 trillion in infrastructure investments that the Trump administration has promised, as well as a huge hole in the budget that it will likely never be able to fill.”
The report, which is not an analysis of the plan, instead makes the case that the infrastructure plan is the wrong way to go about rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.
Instead, the report proposes that we should spend money on things that could help build the infrastructure we want, like higher minimum wage, job training, and child care.
The report argues that we need to invest in things like more flexible work hours, better pay for employees, and a “more robust apprenticeship program.”
While those are all positive things, Demos argues that a big chunk of that money should instead go towards “federal-based investment in public transit, roads, bridges, tunnels, and water systems.”
This would include investing in things that would not require federal funding.
The plan that the White House put forth to make this infrastructure plan work would have us spend $5 trillion on roads, $10 trillion on water systems, and $20 trillion on rail.
Demos explains that this $10 billion would be used to create “a new national public transportation system that would offer the same high quality of service and reliable, affordable and reliable transportation for our residents and visitors as the federal transit system that we have today.”
While this sounds good in theory, the plan would also be funded by tax increases, which means that the plan is not a win-win for the country, but instead would actually make the country less safe.
It’s also important to note that Trump has a long history of lying about his plans to invest the nation’s money into infrastructure.
Back in 2014, Trump claimed that the country needed to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, a claim that was debunked by a review of Federal Reserve data.
The Federal Reserve later admitted that the $1 billion estimate was wrong, but that did not mean that Trump was wrong about how much infrastructure spending the country would need to get off the ground.
It seems that Trump is more concerned with how much money we spend on infrastructure than he is with how we actually build it.