Trump and Democrats Issue Competing Infrastructure Plans

Senate Democrats have proposed an infrastructure plan that calls for $1 trillion in federal deficit spending. In detail, the plan calls for:

• $100 billion for reconstructing roads and bridges;
• $100 billion to "revitalize Main Street," that is, subsidies to New Urbanism and affordable housing;
• $10 billion for TIGER stimulus projects;
• $110 billion for reconstructing water and sewer;
• $50 billion for modernizing rail (Amtrak and freight railroad) infrastructure;
• $130 billion to repair and expand transit;
• $75 billion for rebuilding public schools;
• $30 billion to improve airports;
• $10 billion for ports and waterways;
• $25 billion to improve communities' resistance to natural disasters;
• $100 billion for a next-generation electrical grid;
• $20 billion for broadband;
• $20 billion for public lands and tribal infrastructure;
• $10 billion for VA hospitals;
• $10 billion for an infrastructure bank;
• $200 billion for "vital projects" that "think big," such as building "the world's fastest trains."

In response, someone has leaked what is supposedly the Trump administration's own list of 50 infrastructure priority projects. It includes such boondoggles as a Dallas-Houston passenger rail line, the congestion-inducing Maryland Purple Line, the $14 billion Hudson River tunnels, and completion of the $2.2-billion-per-mile Second Avenue Subway. Except for the Dallas-Houston line, most of the passenger rail projects were already pretty well decided, but they are still foolish investments that will cost a lot and return little to the economy. There are supposedly more than 250 other projects on a priority list, but it isn't absolutely certain that this list was endorsed by Trump or merely proposed to him.

Update: While I am now certain that the supposed Trump priority list was really "fake"—that is, not really from the administration—it appears that the reason why the Dallas-Houston line was on the list is that it is supposed to be entirely privately financed. While I am skeptical that private funders could profitably build and operate such a line, if they could, it would be appropriate (though unnecessary) to have it on such a priority list.

What most people have been calling Trump's infrastructure plan calls for giving tax credits to private investors who spend money on these kind of infrastructure projects. This has some virtues over the Democratic proposal of direct federal spending:

1. While the Democrats take a top-down approach dictating where the money will go, Trump leaves the setting of priorities to state and local governments, which have already approved most of the projects on his top-50 list;
2. Where Democrats would commit the federal government to spend an arbitrary amount of money whether it needs to be spent or not, Trump lets state and local governments decide how much to spend and how they will pay for it;
3. Where Democrats would add $1 trillion to the deficit, Trump relies on a tax credit program that will cost the feds no more than $167 billion per trillion in spending (less, obviously, if less than $1 trillion is spent);
4. Where a lot of the Democrats' money would go down a rat hole, at least some of federal tax credits that Trump's plan would issue will be offset by the reduced use of tax-free municipal bonds and taxes paid by companies and workers earning the money.

Typical of central planners, the dollar figures in the Democrats' plan are completely arbitrary.

• Why should trains and transit, which carry 1 percent as many passenger miles as roads, get roughly as much money as roads and bridges (and probably more considering much of the $200 billion "vital infrastructure" fund would go for high-speed rail)?
• Why spend $40 billion expanding transit and no money expanding highways when highway use is growing faster than transit in most places and most years?
• Why no money for upgrading the air traffic control system (which is on Trump's top-50 list)? I don't support the use of tax dollars for such things, but it is a huge oversight from a plan predicated on the idea that federal central planners know the best places to spend your money.
• Why $110 billion on water and sewer, and not $100 billion or $120 billion? It seems the point of these numbers is to add up to a nice round $1 trillion while divvying up the money to special-interest groups.
• For that matter, why any at all on water, sewer, and the electrical grid when these should already be adequately funded through user fees?
• Why is education even on the list when the federal government has never spent more than token amounts of money for school infrastructure?

My complaints about the Trump plan have been:

1. It's not really a plan—it's just one funding tool;
2. It doesn't prevent state and local governments from spending the money on completely looney projects such as the aforementioned Dallas–Houston high-speed rail; and
3. The private-partnership aspect has confused many people into believing that it will only fund projects that can be paid for out of user fees when in fact most projects would require state and local taxpayers to ultimately repay the private contractors out of tax dollars.

While these are valid complaints, the Trump plan is more bottom-up than top-down, as most if not all of the projects on the possibly fake priority list are supported by state and local officials. And while Trump brought a new idea to the table, the Democrats' plan is the same old borrow-and-spend formula that they have used in the past. This is actually worse than tax-and-spend because taxing and spending doesn't leave huge debt problems and interest payments for the future.

While we can hope that Trump's projects will rely more on user fees more than taxes, at the moment the score has to be Trump 1/2, Democrats minus 1.