America’s Three Infrastructure Problems
Date Posted: February 22, 2018
Posted In: Discussion, News,
From Vox: Can we stop saying Donald Trump has a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan? He doesn’t. He has a $200 billion infrastructure plan — and even that lacks any details about how it’ll be paid for, though the White House promises it will be.
So where did that $1.5 trillion number come from? According to the White House, the other $1.3 trillion will be kicked in by states and private investors that can get a subsidy from the feds for financing the bulk of new projects. (The Trump administration will take on 20 percent of a project’s cost if states foot the bill for the other 80 percent, and is offering financing help for private investors.)
And even if you believe the size of the administration’s infrastructure plan is properly expressed in terms of how much they’re hoping other people spend along with it, “their assumptions are about as rosy as rosy can get,” says Marc Scribner, an infrastructure expert at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute.
But what the Trump administration giveth, the Trump administration more than taketh away. Alongside Trump’s $200 billion infrastructure plan is his 2019 budget proposal, which includes — wait for it — hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to other categories of infrastructure spending.
“You’re talking about a net cut to federal infrastructure potentially on the order of $50 to $60 billion,” says Jacob Leibenluft, of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And that’s on top of other cuts to state and local funding that would squeeze state budgets and make it harder for them to fund their own infrastructure programs.
The White House’s $1.5 trillion number, which much of the media parroted uncritically, is not the only way the infrastructure debate is confused and confusing. On the left and the right, it’s dogma that America’s infrastructure is crumbling, that investment is needed to build our economic future, that the emergency is upon us. But what, precisely, is the nature of this emergency? What kind of investment is needed?
America has many infrastructure problems, not just one
It’s useful to cut America’s infrastructure needs into three categories: existing infrastructure, future infrastructure, and, overlapping with both categories, how America builds infrastructure. Let’s take them in turn.
When people talk about “crumbling” infrastructure, they’re talking about existing infrastructure — bridges that have already been built, roads that have already been laid, airports that are already in operation.