It’s almost like some people get elected to positions for which they are in no way qualified, as in not one single clue.
Yes, I’m talking about when my college fraternity elected me as public relations chairman, mainly because I had a collection of VHS movies that I was willing to let others borrow. Of course, they had to leave their student IDs with me until they returned the movie, an idea that I scrapped after I got such bad PR from my brothers, who then stopped returning movies they had borrowed.
On a totally unrelated note regarding unqualified elected officials, I turn to the infrastructure plan unveiled by President Donald Trump in February. In his State of the Union, he said it was time to fix the “crumbling infrastructure” of the country, calling for $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure investment.
Turns out, the $1.5 trillion his plan called for was actually $200 billion in federal investment that was supposed to generate another $1.3 trillion from local and state governments and private investors. I wrote earlier about how the plan has the hallmarks of a nightmare.
Turns out, others think the same.
“Maybe it’s like the miracle of the loaves and fishes,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in a March 1 hearing by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. “It did work 2,000 years ago, but I just don’t think it’s going to work here.”
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao spoke before the panel on the infrastructure plan. Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., pointed out that the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model projected that the $200 billion in federal money would, at most, generate $30 billion in local, state and private spending.
Chao disagreed, of course, saying, “It actually takes people with real-life business experience to know how it works.”
The White House released a statement March 2 criticizing the Penn Wharton report for a lack of transparency and improper modeling, saying it doesn’t model the plan’s actual details. Penn Wharton replied with details on how the model was researched and put together.
It used a down-home example to explain how $200 billion in federal funds would result in only modest extra spending, $30 billion being a bigly amount less than $1.3 trillion. Penn Wharton said think of the federal money as a $5 restaurant coupon that kicks in if you spend $10.
The customer will still spend the $10 to redeem the free $5, but it is doubtful the $5 will cause a patron to decide, yeah, I’ll buy $20 worth of food. The states, it argued, will behave similarly, using the federal money to free up state money for other projects or services.
I remember years ago the argument that lotteries are a great deal because the money they generate would be used for education. But would that money go on top of what states were already spending on education, or would states use lottery cash for education and then use the money they previously spent on education elsewhere?
The Penn Wharton model is directed by Kent Smetters, a former economist in President George W. Bush’s administration. He told The New York Times that the model’s exhaustive research didn’t justify optimism that the current administration’s $1.3 trillion goal is achievable.
“When we reviewed the literature, there just really is no set of studies that support that massive multiplier effect, where you can get $1.5 trillion,” Smetters said. Kevin DeGood, an analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, told The Times that since most of the funding responsibilities are on the states, many “won’t bother.”
Many Republicans in Washington favor parts of the plan that would streamline the approval and permit process but wonder where the $200 billion is going to come from. If it is siphoned from other infrastructure projects — as many Democrats predict — then it’s not much of a new investment anyway.
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