Clinton and Sanders Infrastructure Plans

Dear Friends,

Hillary Clinton has finally come out with an infrastructure plan, and as you might imagine it is very middle of the road and certainly would not accomplish what even she says we need.

Everybody agrees that the United States infrastructure is in grave need of repair, costs Americans a ton of unnecessary money each year and is way behind that of other developed countries.  If you don't believe me read the article in Fortune (here) entitled "An investment in America's infrastructure could cost taxpayers nothing".  It is a full throated argument for investing huge sums of money in our infrastructure.

There seems to be general agreement that the US needs to invest well over $1 trillion in our infrastructure to repair it and bring it to a competitive level with other developed countries.  As the Fortune article points out, an up to date infrastructure would save everybody money that is currently spent on lost time and damage done by a crumbling and overcrowded infrastructure.  In addition, infrastructure spending creates lots of good paying jobs.  The Fortune article estimates that even a $18 billion annual investment in infrastructure would create 216,000 jobs in the first year.  As the Fortune article concludes, "It is hard to think of a timelier win-win proposal."

Bernie Sanders has proposed increasing our infrastructure spending by $1 trillion over the next five years (here).  Hillary Clinton, while acknowledging that estimates of "the size of our 'infrastructure gap' register in the trillions of dollars", proposes that we increase our infrastructure spending by just $275 million over the next five years (here).

You can see a comparison of the two plans at Dave Johnson's blog on The Huffington Post (here).

Secretary Clinton's proposal can hardly be called an incremental improvement much less any kind of a solution to our infrastructure deficit.  It is, of course, better than nothing.  Senator Sanders' proposal truly addresses both the infrastructure deficit we face as well as the need for many more good paying jobs.  Once again the extremely modest proposal from the establishment candidate will not generate any enthusiasm among those in our country who are looking for real change and bold ideas.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal