During a speech Sunday at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Hillary Clinton announced a few details of her proposal for restoring the decaying U.S. infrastructure. Clinton told a crowd packed with members of the Laborers International Union and Carpenters Union that, as president, she would boost federal infrastructure investment by $250 billion over the next five years to "bankroll upgrades to roads, bridges, airports and public transit." She said she would also put $25 billion into an national infrastructure bank:
"To build a strong economy for our future, we must start by building strong infrastructure today," Clinton said flanked by paintings of Daniel Webster, Samuel Adams and George Washington. "I want our cities to be in the forefront of cities anywhere in the world. I want our workers to be the most competitive and productive in the world. I want us, once again, to think big and look up, beyond the horizon of what is possible in America."
The former secretary of state teased that the plan would also call for universal broadband by 2020, more focus on creating a clean energy grid and bringing back Build America bonds, municipal bonds that were used during to fund infrastructure projects during the Great Recession in 2009.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s only real competition in the race for the Democratic nomination for president, proposed in January a trillion-dollar infrastructure investment plan—the Rebuild America Act of 2015—over five years, which includes money for an infrastructure bank. He has said he would pay for this by closing business tax loopholes. Clinton said she will cover her plan with business tax reform, which would also mean closing loopholes.
The infrastructure bank concept dates back to the 1980s and the campaigns of Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis. Bill Clinton proposed the idea in 1992. It was raised again by Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel in 2007. In 2008 and again in 2010, President Obama backed their $60 billion bank proposal. But congressional Republicans blocked the legislation. The idea behind the bank is to leverage private investment in infrastructure. The Clinton campaign estimates private investments from the candidate’s proposal at $225 billion. Sanders’ infrastructure program would also seed the infrastructure bank with $25 billion, but his campaign estimated the privately leveraged investment from the bank’s efforts would tally $250 billion.
The need for infrastructure investment is certainly there. Indeed, a much larger plan would not be out of line given the very great needs. For instance, 11 percent of the nation’s bridges are structurally deficient and a fourth of them are functionally obsolete. Similar deficiencies can be found in schools, dams, levees, railroads, the electrical grid, and wastewater facilities. In its 2013 quadrennial report card on U.S. infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers said the nation would need to invest an additional $1.6 trillion by 2020 to put its infrastructure into good repair. And that doesn’t include innovative infrastructure like universal broadband.
The problem—as Sanders, Clinton and everyone else who supports a greater investment in infrastructure are all too well aware of—is that Congress is controlled by people who would rather see the rot continue than even hint at the possibility of adjusting the tax code to pay for the needed improvements. As expected, a number of right-wing organizations immediately criticized Clinton’s proposal as a boondoggle.
