There is, thankfully, less to President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to boost infrastructure spending than meets the eye. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton proposed spending $275 billion on roads, bridges, rail-transit systems, and the like over ten years. Trump said we should spend $550 billion: a number he chose because it was twice hers. Sometimes he has talked about a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. But a paper from Trump’s advisers calls for $137 billion in tax credits, which they hope will call forth the rest of the trillion dollars.
Proponents of an infrastructure-building boom, who have usually been on the left rather than the right, have generally made three arguments for it. A fourth may have more validity.
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