Taxpayers will get fleeced
and we won’t get the projects we really need
By Robert
Reich
To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibtiwa6TxWQ
Our country is in dire need of massive investments in infrastructure, but what Donald Trump is proposing is nothing more than a huge tax giveaway for the rich.
1. It’s a giant public subsidy to developers and investors.
Rather than taxing the wealthy and then using
the money to fix our dangerously outdated roads, bridges, airports, water
systems, Trump wants to give rich developers and Wall Street investors tax
credits to encourage them to do it
That means that for every dollar they put into
a project, they’d actually pay only 18 cents and we would contribute the other 82 cents through our tax dollars.
2. We’d be turning over public roads and bridges to private
corporations who will charge us expensive tolls and earn big profits.
These tolls will be set high in order to satisfy the profit margins demanded by elite Wall Street investors. So—essentially—we pay twice – once when we subsidize the developers and investors with our tax dollars, and then secondly when we pay the tolls and user fees that also go into their pockets.
3. We get the wrong kind of infrastructure.
Projects that will be most attractive to Wall
Street investors are those whose tolls and fees bring in the biggest bucks –
giant mega-projects like major new throughways and new bridges.
Not the thousands of smaller bridges,
airports, pipes, and water treatment facilities most in need of repair. Not the
needs of rural communities and smaller cities and towns too small to generate
the tolls and other user fees equity investors want. Not clean energy.
To really make America great again we need
more and better infrastructure that’s for the public – not for
big developers and investors. And the only way we get that is if corporations
and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books,
including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of
Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.