There is no reason why the states shouldn’t handle their own infrastructure. Not only in funding, but in direction and method of production and “distribution.”
But politicians aiming for the presidency tend not to even consider that heresy. And journalists, of course, tend to rah-rah for the nationalist planning notion, too. It’s easier to cover everything from Washington. I remember much talk of “our crumbling infrastructure” back in the 1980s.
Thankfully, Shikha Dalmia has not jumped onto that bandwagon. The Reason writer notes that Trump is trumping Obama’s fling with “shovel-ready jobs,” demanding that the federal government spend up to a trillion in infrastructure “stimulus.”
Forget for the moment the obvious contradiction: pretending to be an outsider, Trump is pushing as “insiderish” a program as imaginable.
I wonder: is Trump playing the cuckoo here, placing an alien idea into his constituents’ nests? Are his supporters about to be “cucked”? (As alt-rightists like to put it.)
Trump looks abroad for models of beautiful roads and bridges and trains and all the rest. If you travel “from Dubai, Qatar, and China,” he bemoans, our biggest cities give off a certain “Third World” vibe.
Dalmia blanches: “the countries Trump is praising as models for a better America are all autocracies that have made a complete hash of things.”
Boy, we do not need to find another way to make a complete hash of things here in the States. And our federal budgets are strained (and pushing us further into debt) as it is.
Besides, it is not written in stone, concrete, or even asphalt, that these United States’ roads and bridges must be made the federal government’s business.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Trump’s Road Rage”
I think now the interstate commerce clause is used to justify almost every dime spent on state roads and bridges.
What about railroads? They always seem to find their way into ‘infrastructure’ bills. Weren’t they originally built by private companies?
Yes, they were. The story of James J Hill and the Great Northern should be in every history book, but is not (except in a few private schools). The story of the railroads, the union busting, the exploitation of Asians (mostly Chinese at the time), and how govt took over and destroyed what could have been a still-valid way of traveling should be exposed to all who seek “urban transit solutions” …
I have travelled to these places…foreign and domestic. Trump is right…they do.