Hillary Clinton's plans to improve infrastructure in the USA weren't ambitious enough, but at least she had plans, says Aaron Betsky in this Opinion column.
America needs a lot of work. Its roads and bridges are crumbling. Its airports are a mess. It has virtually no long-distance public transportation system. Below the surface, sewers and water lines are leaking billions of gallons. Something needs to be done. Will President Trump do it? Nobody knows.
There was a plan. In her election platform, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton promised $275 billion in infrastructure investment. All but $25 billion of that would have come from the federal government, and she says she would have paid for it with new taxes on the wealthy.
The $25 billion would, she claimed, have leveraged another $250 billion in private investment. Trump has no more than the notion that he will come up with such a plan and spend a trillion dollars, which at least is a lot more than Clinton would have.
Just about every presidential candidate for the last three decades has promised to address the deferred maintenance all around us and help build a better base for economic growth and social cohesion. In 1992, I wrote several articles about the massive investments in infrastructure presidential candidate Bill Clinton promised. I even bought stock in construction companies I thought would benefit from the coming boom. I was wrong.