Where Are Badly Needed Infrastructure Improvements?

Financial FAQs

It’s really incredible that Republican leaders of both the House and Senate can’t see that Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure proposal would boost growth. It's the one item that would stir us out of the 2 percent growth doldrums.

The all-Republican congress and White House are making a serious mistake in letting politics and ideology get in the way of economic growth. Does anyone seriously believe their attempts to repeal Obamacare would work with so many of their red state constituents dependent on Medicare?

And now they want to tackle a regressive tax reform plan in which, according to the Tax Policy Center, 76.1 percent of the net tax cuts would flow to the richest 1 percent of households in 2017.  And by 2025, essentially all of the net tax cuts — 99.6 percent — would go to the top 1 percent. That doesn’t even pass the smell test.

However, we have to remember Republicans have always hated the idea of another New Deal, because it would bust their bubble that government investment can’t work; because it did work to build our highways, Internet, shots to the Moon, educational system, a cleaner (and more productive) environment, and so forth.

President Trump’s infrastructure proposal would work, even if partially funded with $40 billion from Saudi Arabia and its allies. But Trump is now toxic with the business community after his Charlottesville racist fiasco. His 34 percent voter base, (or maybe now 24 percent in more recent polling) that continue to support him, even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue, won’t keep him in power, as he believes.

But higher economic growth would make him more popular. Marketwatch’s Jeff Bartash has highlighted what it would take to take US out of the doldrums. “Lackluster business investment is one of the chief reasons the U.S. continues to bob along at about 2 percent annual growth, less than two-thirds the historic average. Investment is what spurs new inventions, makes it easier for workers to do their jobs and allows the economy to expand at a faster rate.”

A souped-up economy in turn generates higher profits, fatter dividend payments and bigger paychecks for workers, says Bartash. “Whatever hope businesses may have had earlier in the year, however, has been clouded by the failure of a flailing Trump White House to push through tax cuts, more spending on public works and other measures to aid big and small companies alike.”

It’s so foolish.  President Trump and Republicans won’t accomplish anything, if Trump can’t renounce his neo-nazis, white nationalist and Ku Klux Klan supports.

Harlan Green © 2017

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