Trump’s infrastructure plan has morphed into a corporate tax holiday pork trough designed to finance and convert public to toll bridges and roads. Texas and other progressive commuters are bitterly opposed to these regressive taxes and alongside principled libertarians called it Perry’s Land Grab. The only argument for troll roads is that they are a better funding source than food taxes at the local level. This begs the question of why regressive sales taxes must be used by any level of government. But certainly toll roads are NOT more fairly financed than federal revenues. Do Not Let Your Democratic Representatives Vote for This Travesty. Those that do should be shunned. As is Donald Trump's favorable rating this infrastructure plan should and is becoming a deepening net negative!
In the last week the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have run editorials against the smoke and mirror tax dodge for toll road privateers. Rush Limbaugh loves the idea. Occupy Democrats said:
this infrastructure plan likely won’t work. If it does work, it will be giving public highways to millionaire and billionaire investors for pennies on the dollar. You, already paying taxes for roads, will be paying tolls. You’ll be getting no public roads, because the “investors” will hold equity in those roads. Your (already paid) tax money will be returned en masse to the millionaires you’re also paying tolls to.
A better idea, the economists write, would be to use a program created by the Democrats’ 2009 Recovery Act called Build American Bonds. Those bonds subsidize local communities which invest in things like public schools, public roads and other things that the public owns. (Read: things that make everyones life better and that millionaires and billionaires don’t collect tolls on.)
Imagine that. America’s most trusted conservative news source publishing an opinion that concludes President Barack Obama’s stimulus package — which many, including Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, criticized as too weak — is better than Trump’s phony bologna “infrastructure plan.”
If you feel inclined to join Rush in supporting this fiasco first read how Rick Perry is escaping Texas just ahead of a tar and feathering as his junk bond crippled toll schemes sunk his local fortunes.
This is not the infrastructure we need. This replaces progressively funded federal solutions with one of the worst ways to fix private bridges — turning them over to private principalities to run. Back to medieval solutions? Louis XVI was more progressive than that!
The Trump plan has nothing for public schools. Nothing for Flint and other communities water emergencies. Nothing unless some privateer can be granted a royal charter to make a buck off a private need.
Don’t make a fetish out of getting along with the assortment of nut jobs moving into DC. Read this guide for resistance written by people who just saw how it can be accomplished on the hill,
We didn’t win the white house but we are not beaten and we shouldn’t join them. Donald Trump is going to be very easy to say no to since he turns even his better angels to bad efforts. Stop Trump by holding your own representatives to account. Urge them to resist with every effort your able to muster!