Monday, April 29, 2019

Trump Wants to Spend $2 Trillion on Infrastructure


Or better yet, a short slide show version.

At last month's St. Patrick's Day lunch in the Capitol, Trump told Richard Neal, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House's tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, that he wants to spend close to $2 trillion on infrastructure, according to Axios sources.

What a colossal bureaucratic, crony, waste of money this would be at a time when the US budget is already way out of control.

But Jonathan Swan writes for Axios:
A former senior White House official told me that on infrastructure, Trump's instincts are much closer to Elizabeth Warren's than they are to his tight-fisted acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
And this is why this is so alarming right now.  Trump meets on Tuesday with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to discuss infrastructure.

And it get worse. Pelosi requested this meeting. She knows what grand infrastructure programs mean to Trump.

Notes Swan:
Trump came into office imagining a presidency in which new projects — "built by the Trump administration" — would be erected all over the country, sources close to him tell me...
In an early 2017 infrastructure meeting at the White House with his friend, New York real estate billionaire Richard LeFrak, Trump laid out his grand Trumpian vision. "They say Eisenhower was the greatest infrastructure president. They named the highway system after him," Trump said, per a source who was in the room. "But we're going to do double, triple, quadruple, what Eisenhower did."

-RW


3 comments:

  1. more evidence this due is a POS

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  2. I say let him spend $2 trillion on infrastructure if he spends at least $2 trillion less on war and foreign meddling.

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  3. These high wages paid to people who run construction equipment are just the normal part of the free market, right? Seriously, why do we never hear about this?

    The International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) is a trade union within the United States-based AFL-CIO representing primarily construction workers who work as heavy equipment operators, mechanics, surveyors, and stationary engineers (also called operating engineers or power engineers) who maintain heating and other systems in buildings and industrial complexes, in the United States and Canada.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_of_Operating_Engineers

    OPERATING ENGINEERS LOCAL 324
    2017 WAGE AND FRINGE BENEFIT RATES FOR MICHIGAN INFRASTRUCTURE AND TRANSPORTATION ASSOCIATION (MITA), ROAD AGREEMENT

    Class I: Total regular time hourly wage: $55.79

    https://mi-ita.site-ym.com/page/RdOpENG/Operating-Engineers-Wage-Rates-for-Road-Building-Construction.htm

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