Trump infrastructure plan is a scam; he can’t do better

Donald Trump doesn’t give a dam. Or a bridge. Or a road. Or a sewer system. Or any of the other things we talk about when we talk about infrastructure.

But how can that be when he just announced a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan? That’s easy:

It’s not a plan, it’s a scam. The $1.5 trillion number is just made up; he’s only proposing federal spending of $200 billion, which is somehow supposed to magically induce a vastly bigger overall increase in infrastructure investment, mainly paid for either by state and local governments (which are not exactly rolling in cash, but whatever) or by the private sector.

And even the $200 billion is essentially fraudulent: The budget proposal announced the same day doesn’t just impose savage cuts on the poor, it includes sharp cuts for the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy and other agencies that would be crucially involved in any real infrastructure plan. Realistically, Trump’s offer on infrastructure is this: nothing.

Yet there is something puzzling about Trump’s failure to come up with a remotely plausible plan. After all, there would be major economic and political advantages.

First, the economics: America desperately needs to repair and upgrade its deteriorating roads, water systems, power grid and more. We’re no longer a depressed economy that needs public investment to put the unemployed back to work, but it’s still something that needs doing.

Where would the money come from? Well, if you don’t worry too much about deficits — and as we’ve just seen, Republicans don’t care at all about deficits as long as a Democrat isn’t in the White House — we can just borrow it. Despite a modest rise in interest rates, the federal government can still borrow very cheaply: The interest rate on inflation-protected long-term bonds is still less than 1 percent, which is below realistic estimates of longrun economic growth, let alone the Trump administration’s fantasy numbers. So borrowing now to pay for essential infrastructure would still be good economics.

And as I said, there would be political advantages, too. If Trump just pushed ahead with a straightforward, conventional public investment plan, he could trumpet the number of workers employed on new projects.

Furthermore, he could surely find a way to stick his name on many of those projects.

So why isn’t Trump proposing something real? Why this dog’s breakfast of a proposal that everyone knows won’t go anywhere?

Part of the answer is that in practice Trump always defers to Republican orthodoxy, and the modern GOP hates any program that might show people that government can work and help people.

But I also suspect that Trump is afraid to try anything substantive.

To do public investment successfully, you need leadership and advice from experts. And this administration doesn’t do expertise. Not only do experts have a nasty habit of telling you things you don’t want to hear, their loyalty is suspect: You never know when their professional ethics might kick in.

So the Trump administration probably couldn’t put together a real infrastructure plan even if it wanted to. And that’s why it didn’t.