President Trump sat down this week with Democratic leaders to start putting a plan together for round two of his promised infrastructure plan. During the meeting the group put a number on the target amount of money that will be spent: $2 trillion.
According to a statement put out by the White House, the $2 trillion will go towards “roads, highways, bridges, tunnels and railroads, modernizing our air travel system, and expanding broadband access for our great farmers and rural America.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi took questions after the meeting with President Trump. They told reporters that President Trump agreed to meet with them again in three weeks to present them with his plan for where the money will come from.
And where the money will come from will likely be the sticking point in making this plan a reality. That’s because President Trump seems more aligned with Democrats than with his own party when it comes to infrastructure funding. President Trump’s first plan called for raising $1.5 trillion using only $200 billion of federal funds. The rest was to be contributed by states, local governments, and – most importantly – public-private partnerships.
President Trump himself reportedly called the old plan “so stupid,” saying he’s against public-private partnerships. He blamed the bill on his former top economic advisor Gary Cohn. But funding from the private sector is one of the Republican leadership’s main talking points.
Both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) doubled down on their support for public-private partnerships on Thursday. More importantly though, not a single Republican member of Congress attended the meeting. Even if President Trump and the Democrats can bring a funding bill through the House, it won’t make it to President Trump’s desk without support from the Republican-controlled Senate.
Source: gobytrucknews, truckinginfo, thehill, forbes, slate, politico
Public -private partnerships is code for toll roads,
Toll road contracts have just as much inflation pressure as normal public funded roads. They also have just much abuse on the public side. There is no win for taxpayers by adding a layer of beauracracy.
The only win is no scale house,
One way or the other, it all comes out of the common tax payers pockets.
It will pass but drivers won’t see any money for it will go to airports and trains railyards calif. Will see most of it
Get ready for a lot of solar and wind power projects plus getting high speed internet to people who made the conscious choice to live 50 miles off the grid.
Oh, and the road project part of the funds will be eaten up with environmental impact studies (for existing roads too) and paying lawyers to fight all the environmental and NIMBY law suits.
Don’t even ask about the requirement for union labor which will inflate all the construction costs by at least 30 percent.
This is exactly the reason why California’s bullet train couldn’t be built from LA to San Francisco. After lawsuits, CEQA, and Nimby protestors, California got a train to nowhere. Locals will abuse the environmental laws and zoning laws to cripple the infrastructure plan and lawyers are dying to get a piece of those 2 trillion dollars.
Without “those idiots who made the conscious choice to live 50 miles off the grid”, what the hell do you think you would be eating? More noodles from China?
With all due respect Phloda, I would strongly suggest you think out your manner of philosophy.
30% …. where do you idiots come from? Yeah, those damn unions and their higher standards for workers.
Same workers who have priced themselves out of the market expect for the private sector. Screw the damb unions!
Phloda, I don’t want to import vegetables from China (they use night soil for fertilizer), I don’t want to walk or ride my bike to work, and I don’t want more if the country on welfare. I don’t know about what’s right for spending as they planned, but what you suggest as the outcome, is very pessimistic.
This’ll be just like the Obama one. The money will go out to the states, and they’ll set up a few cones, and then the money will just disappear.
Great news for all the special interest groups and it will take 2 years to get put into process. No instant gratification with the government. Even when both parties agree on something.
And you get to pay for it all. Don’t you find it odd that the Trump administration and GOP rushed to give the wealthy and corporations a 15% permanent tax cut, and now as your measly 1% tax cut is about to expire in 2020….. they decide to spend 2 Trillion in taxpayer dollars?
What’s wrong with union labor?
That cost is already factored in to those projects.
If they win the bid in a fair bidding process, nothing.
I’ve always thought of “union labor” as an oxymoron. Sort of like “jumbo shrimp”.
How to pay for it ?!? What better reason to rescind the permanent gravy tax cut million/billionaires got and cut all the loopholes. The middle class didn’t disappear, it was stolen and given to the wealthy for free. Eisenhower knew it was a critical need for the nation and taxes covered it. It’s still critical so do it.
If your not angry about this you havent driven on any road in the country for the last 20 years. The construction projects that get done are garbage in less than 5 years the pothole fixes are laughable at best. We have all seen it 6 guys standing around while one works. Roads repaired or replaced to be dug up a month later. There is a much bigger problem that throwing tax dollars at isnt going to fix. The whole system needs rebooted
Amen. Came through Albuquerque last week and some cake eatin bureaucrat thought it would be a great idea to close 3 of 4 lanes on I-40 during the morning rush. Then they figured, what the hell. Let’s close off the 4th and let everybody drive down the shoulder, while four construction workers started ar a patch in the far left lane. Two were leaning on their shovels watching the other two try to figure out how to operate a push broom. Damn desk drivin bureaucrats. Now I know how road rage starts.
Do we really need $35-40m rest areas and does each one have to have it’s own specially designed tourist stop -er I mean bathroom? Are walking paths and bike lanes that no one uses needed? When you put up an overpass does it really require picasso murals and romantic lighting? We could easily get twice as much done with 1/2 the $$$
Before a penny is wasted on this latest proposed “infrastructure proposal” I want a FULL accounting of where every penny from ISTEA, ISTEAII, NEXTEA, (anybody else remember them?) and the obama economic sedation plot went. All of those bills were supposed to “rebuild our roads and bridges”. Where does the federal government get any authority to force taxpayers to pay for broadband service? If a person wants it, they can pay for their own. If you choose to live “50 miles off the grid”, try satellite service. With all the unconstitutional subsidies AmTrack already gets, it should be able to afford to replace every inch of its own rails.
Infrastructure spending takes Toll roads are a tax heavily tilted on trucker shoulders. Truckers have clout but always fail to use it in a sympathetic manner. Angry rhetoric never brings compromise to the table. Toll roads arent an if they are a when and where decided at State level. Ad campaigns that take the public eye off the machine and on to the human being owning and operating it and showing how elevated toll costs place unfair and very expensive financial burdens on people who after all are bringing into the area every single thing the entire population of the area depends on for every single aspect of their modern lives is the only way to gain sympathy that may help to lower heavy truck toll amounts. The public never has the culmative costs for one operator’s family put right in front of their face. They only see the single small $ per axle toll rate. Not the $thousands it adds up to for one trucker.
Politics is business and business is politics. The problem is the gruesome corruption in business and politics. Everything government does makes the fat corporate cats happy one way or the other while the public burden grows exponentially every year. The left – right paradigm in politics is a myth and regardless of which side is in charge only the “special interests” groups win while the faceless masses fall further into poverty and slavery.
Look: when the economy is in a recession they blame the “law of supply and demand” for the falling labor wages, right? Then inflation hits and they blame the same “law” for the growing prices on groceries and all consumer goods, right? But now for the last couple of years they say the the economy is booming, but wages are going down and at best are stagnating while the cost of living grows and grows constantly at an alarming rate, right?
In the trucking industry the freight rates are plummeting while the cost of doing business is skyrocketing. Why?
How cone that since the second half of the 1980s the “law of supply and demand” never applied to labor in the so called “booming economy” while it only applies in recessions?????
How come that only the politicians, the bankers and the corporations get filthy rich regardless of what the economy is doing while labor looses either, or?????
Folks, this is what globalism is and this is what globalism does ! “Greed & Corruption” is the name of the game and things are heading to disaster while the seven billion faceless slaves world wide are being plunged into the worst poverty and dependence in human history when a small elitist global minority grab all the power and wealth of this world for themselves !!!
Anyway, public – private partnership is just another way for the special interest groups (as in the corporate fat cats, the politicians which get their pockets lined up, the bureaucrats which make it happen and the bankers which get to collect more interest on the debts) to squeeze more public money and get even richer on the backs of the people which get nothing but the burden of maintaining the exponentially growing public debt while labor see their wages plummeting and their tax burden growing when the cost of living grows and grows day in and day out.
Unfortunately now in the XXI century the term “banana republic” applies world wide and the USA is not an exception with its $22+ trillion of federal debt and an estimated $200 trillion of public and private debt combined !
I don’t see any solution for this mess other than a total and complete reset of all things at the global level and going back to local economies and truly independent and sovereign nation states. At least that way bad things can be contained to some degree where they start instead of having the whole world in turmoil every time the globalists get the sniffles because their profits don’t constantly grow at an exponential rate !!!