President Trump meets privately with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who emerge announcing “goodwill” and a common commitment to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure spending. Did Trump get played? Will Democrat insistence on environmental regulations drag out projects and jack up their price?
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$2 Trillion of ‘Goodwill’: Did Pelosi and Schumer Just Play Trump?
President Trump meets privately with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who emerge announcing “goodwill” and a common commitment to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure spending. Did Trump get played? Will Democrat insistence on environmental regulations drag out projects and jack up their price?
13 replies on “$2 Trillion of ‘Goodwill’: Did Pelosi and Schumer Just Play Trump?”
Several libertarian organisations and one other organisation did some home work on the bridges. It turns out that most of the federal bridges that need fixing are on private land in the west. The land was sold or leased but the government retained the ownership of those bridges. Due to modern roads nearby they get little or no traffic. Just a few farm machines and livestock. Sorry I can’t find the article.
While most libertarian organisations like the Mises org can’t figure out Trump and his tactics he is using their data.
Several of us have suggested to Trump on his twitter, in the suggestions box at the whitehouse.gov and on Q anon, that he shift infrastructure to a crowd funding mechanism. The suggestions that he crowd fund the wall have been taken up. ‘We the people shall build the wall’ founder, Brian Kolfage, met Trump after crowd funding was advocated on social media, and a congress woman proposed it, and before the gofundme project started. Kolfage is now at 22.2 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kolfage#Border_wall
I think Trump will slip crowd funding in. Trump is good at disguising a whale as a minnow.
Free market road and bridge building uses four mechanisms:
1. The construction cost of most suburban roads is bundled into the land cost. This is also true for most new light and heavy industrial developments so that’s not a problem. Maintenance sinking funds that immune to government diversion is a challenge. Ideally they should be trust funds not controlled by local governments.
2. Tollways and toll bridges. These are often objected to by some as a privacy risk but the technology to do them privately, anonymously and quickly has been developed. The most modern tool is a Radio-frequency identification (RFID) pay card bought at a store and topped up in a shop (or online if you are not concerned with privacy). A signal booster allows an over head or road side billing toll unit to deduct value from the RFID. This allows billing at fulls speed. A camera will still log the number plates of non payers and bill them. Those with no money can still get the cards from charities.[Note: when bar-codes were first invented, 1952, there was a proposal to put a machine readable bar-code on the tops of cars. It was not taken up. Again for privacy reasons.]
3. Road crew QR tipping. This technology is in the works. Essentially a sign saying if you want this fixed faster send a tip to this QR. This takes advantage of the QR billing systems in most phones.
4. Assurance contracts or dominant assurance contracts that Fund private roads, bridges, ports, etc. As I’ve indicated he has run with this ball on the wall. This is what Kolfage is doing. There are complex ways to do this.
As indicated this will probably be in the legislation Trump is working on but Trump will have something in there to distract Pelosi and Schumer so they never get round to reading the on page that matters.
Trump has done that with banking and fiance.
Slipping any or all of these things into a bill in very boring and obscure legalese is Trumps style.
Expect Pelosi and Schumer to either declair victory loudly as they fall for Trumps decoy offer or explode all over the place as they take his distraction hook line and sinker.
Can we be provided the notes on that meeting?
All I want the the government to do is; “Build me a bridge, and build me a battleship”.
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic and I don’t think anyone’s getting played.
Consider: right now, Nancy Pelosi is the de facto national leader of the Democratic Party. And I’m sure it hasn’t escaped her notice that the last time a Democrat was in the White House, the Democrats lost well over a thousand elected officials, including those that put her in the Speaker’s seat after 2006.
So…that’s not one but two reasons she may not be so keen to help a Democrat win in 2020. OTOH, in order to maintain her majority–which, let’s not forget, was built on the flipping of traditionally Republican districts in the suburbs and exurbs–she’s got to show she can accomplish something with that majority…which is far from evident given GOP control of the Senate and White House.
So my speculation is–and I said this to some of my buddies a week or more ago–she’s going to reach out to Trump behind the scenes and try to implement some items of mutual interest…in which infrastructure projects would figure prominently. It certainly won’t hurt her among the declining Democratic share of blue-collar voters, and it won’t be bad among the prosperous suburbanites either.
On the other side, Trump’s going to need something besides the tax cut, a lot of judges, and a humming economy to be re-elected: it may seem unfair, but…that’s the name of that tune, and Trump knows it. The alternative for him is to play the full frontal assault card and hope he can run against the “Do-Nothing Congress!” But that’s a high-risk strategy: all it would take is one blip in the economic statistics and…bye-bye!
Meanwhile, the Senate will be quietly filling the bench with good judges and (hopefully) supporting Trump.
Can Trump and Pelosi make this work? I’ll bet they can. Trump, for all that he’s new to the big game here in DC, spent basically his entire adult life working in finance and real estate in New York City, an area not easy to get things accomplished in. So he knows how to play the SCHMOOZEX game as well as anyone.
Will the barking dogs continue to bay at the moon? My guess is, yeah…and Nancy’s already told Trump that, well, that’s the way it’s gonna be, but, not to worry, it’s all kabuki…boob-bait for left-wing bubbas.
So that’s what I said a week ago, and–lo!–here we are…
As a member, I look forward to my time watching and listening to ALL THREE OF YOU AS TO WHAT YOU HAVE TO AND MUST SAY EVERYDAY. The “infrastructure projects” no matter whether they are done “per minimal spec”, the projects are designed and installed for a short-term life cycle (long-term performance is a dirty word for local-state or federal projects) the projects are nothing more than a pay-off to the Trades Unions-carpenters, steel workers, electricians, cement workers and masons, asphalt installers, surveyors, etc., etc…Design and specifications are beyond a joke…minimal standards maximum union scale pay and very good profit percentages for the big GC’s who take turns for the cash-cow teat.
With people trying to buy sports teams rumored not to make any money, maybe instead of naming roads and bridges for dead folks we could auction the naming rights off, and let the buyer handle the maintenance.
They get the opportunity to pay for repairs and upgrades with the upside of bragging at cocktail parties about how well lit, smooth riding and well kept their lanes are compared to some other billionaire. Big companies could buy and rebrand not just the streets to 1 BigCo Way but BigCo Highway and the BigCo exit off BigCo Parkway.
All you have to do is cross the border from Texas to Louisiana on I-10 to discover that individual states do have a lot of the responsibility for road maintenance, even on federal highways. Try crossing the border on a state road and the difference is even more profound. We do things in Texas like build significant financial penalties into time-overruns in contracts, as well as rewarding financially for finishing sooner. And while it does sometimes feel, when driving through highway construction, as if it’s a case of, “didn’t they talk about this project ten years ago,” and also as if by the time they’re done widening, it’ll be obsolete, at the same time I have to say that since they started these financial incentives, things get built well and quickly a lot faster than they used to.
That said, I believe it is also true that I-45 has never once been considered finished in the Houston area since it was begun in the 1950s. They finish one section and then start widening/rebuilding another, and now they’re talking about completely re-routing it around downtown.
The Adopt-A-Highway program is not a financial thing. It’s just the people that have chosen to volunteer to pick up litter on the side of the highway.
I agree, our Government spends a whole lot of money talking about doing something like a road project completing study after study after study. Each study cost $$$$$, which leaves less money for the actual project. The other way of stating that is the cost of the project increases by several times the original estimate.
“Studies”=more bueaucrat minions get more money to feed the Leviathan Beast!
Agreed. We need fewer bureaucrats. A big plus to having fewer bureaucrats making rules and regulations as opposed to those rules and regulations being made in the Congress is we, the voting public, have control of the Congress, we have no control over the minions of bureaucrats.
This reminds me that I need to buy more candles…
When I lived in an unincorporated area, we had dirt roads that had to be maintained. All that lived in the area simply chipped in once a year to bring in DG. As a result of our little community cooperation, we always had well-maintained roads. I agree that this needs to not extend beyond the state level. Once it reaches the federal level, nothing happens at all and the money is just flushed.
They will insist on a; repealing tax cuts and b; ‘green’ projects and so nothing will actually happen other than democrats looking intransigent.