Tag: hit&run

Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) reacted today to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, praising the president in some areas but criticizing him in others.

In an early morning Twitter thread, Amash first noted that “there were two outstanding lines in” the president’s address. One was: “America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control.” The other: “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”

Both were indeed highlights of Trump’s address. The first line came as he discussed the dangers of socialism. “Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” Trump said. “We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” Trump’s words seemed to have brought a frown to the face of democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), as I pointed out last night.

The other line Amash mentioned, about “great nations” not fighting “endless wars,” was also a whopper. As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi noted yesterday, that line came more than a month after Trump ordered the sudden withdrawal of 4,000 U.S. troops fighting the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. “As we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home,” Trump said last night.

The president has also said he will pull 7,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, where the administration is holding peace talks with the Taliban. “As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counterterrorism,” Trump said in his address. “We do know that after two decades of war, the hour has come to at least try for peace.”

Trump’s sentiment in that area was also praised by Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who on Monday criticized bipartisan support for a Senate bill condemning Trump’s plans to withdraw troops from both Middle Eastern countries. “I applaud @realdonaldtrump for delivering an America First vision which included getting out of Afghanistan after almost two decades of being at war,” Paul tweeted last night. “We must stop our endless wars and focus on rebuilding at home.”

Amash wasn’t completely happy with Trump’s speech, claiming he was “hit or miss” when it came to foreign policy. But on the whole, Amash was pleased Trump recognized the need “to bring our forces home from Syria and Afghanistan.”

“One war was never authorized, and the other has gone on for far too long,” Amash said.

Outside of foreign policy, Amash did credit Trump for denouncing “the destructive politics of partisanship,” though he explained that Trump has “been anything but nonpartisan”:

The president rightly denounced the destructive politics of partisanship. Unfortunately, he’s been anything but nonpartisan (see tweets). Americans deserve principled representation and honest policy debates, not politicians who incite suspicion, fear, and hatred of “the others.”

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) February 6, 2019

The Michigan representative didn’t have a whole lot to say about Trump’s remarks on trade (The president defended his decision to place tariffs on Chinese goods and asked Congress to pass a bill that would increase his authority to implement more tariffs.) Amash did, however, recommend that Trump read the works of economists Henry Hazlitt and Frédéric Bastiat:

As for the president’s policies on trade and tariffs, I have a couple book recommendations for him: pic.twitter.com/RvAOjXnPxk

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) February 6, 2019

Amash also criticized Trump for failing to “mention the massive national debt—overwhelmingly the result of reckless spending.” It’s a fair point. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote last night, Trump said nothing about the need to rein in federal spending. This despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office says the federal budget deficit will surpass $1 trillion in 2020. The national debt, meanwhile, hit $22 trillion at the end of 2018. The sort of spending that led to this massive debt “is unsustainable and threatens the prosperity of Americans,” Amash wrote.

Finally, Amash praised Trump’s words on criminal justice reform, particularly regarding the FIRST STEP Act. “My administration worked closely with members of both parties to sign the FIRST STEP Act into law,” Trump said. “This legislation reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African American community. The FIRST STEP Act gives non-violent offenders the chance to re-enter society as productive, law-abiding citizens.”

While Amash was “pleased” Trump “highlighted” this issue, he noted there’s a lot more to be done “to reform the system at both the federal and state levels of government.”

For more Reason State of the Union coverage, you can click here.

During last night’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump said that “human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery.”

As you might expect, no evidence backs up such a claim.

Outlandish tales of depraved immigrants preying on innocent girls is one of the oldest tricks, however, when it comes to stirring up sex-trafficking fears in service of political ends. And in Trump’s case, that’s things like building a big border wall, preventing refugees from seeking asylum here, and portraying himself as the savior of an America overrun by people who don’t belong, many of them criminals.

The sincerity of Trump’s concern for migrant women and girls is belied by his actual policies. His administration has made it harder for people to seek refuge here on humanitarian grounds; tried to specifically prohibit anyone coming here from war-torn countries where these crimes are actually prevalent; and pushes border policies that drive desperate people into the arms of smugglers, where women in particular are more likely to face exploitation or abuse.

There’s evidence to support Trump’s claim that many migrant women will face sexual assault—not the “one in three” he cites, but still too many—and yet the reason these people can’t come through safer means is a direct result of U.S. immigration policy. On the flip side, undocumented immigrants or legal immigrants doing sex work within the U.S. are also at greater risk in a climate where courthouses, hospitals, and police stations are increasingly stalked by immigration agents.

In New York City, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were known to hang around the city’s “human trafficking intervention court”—a court meant for those deemed victims, not traffickers—and pick up women there on prostitution or unlicensed massage charges. Around 91 percent of unlicensed massage arrests in NYC are of non-citizens, according to Kate Mogulescu of Legal Aid.

It’s unclear if these women were counted among the 1,500 human traffickers that Trump’s SOTU speech cited as having been “put behind bars” by ICE last year. The number seems to come from a recent White House press release, which says that ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) “made 1588 Human Trafficking arrests” in fiscal-year 2018. (Though it’s also possible Trump is referring to a favorite Pizzagate/QAnon theory.)

While I can’t definitely say that the human-trafficking arrest claim isn’t true, I’ll point out that federal agencies generally put out statements about any sex-trafficking cases they’re prosecuting, and those numbers don’t nearly match the number of arrests the White House suggests. The ICE website shows nine press releases mentioning sex trafficking in the past year, and two mentioning human trafficking (neither of the latter about criminal cases). Adding general Homeland Security, FBI, and Justice Department press releases still doesn’t get us anywhere near 1,500.

My suspicion is that the White House is counting anyone arrested in “human trafficking operations,” not those arrested and indicted for human trafficking. This is an important distinction, since many of those arrested under these operations have nothing to do with human trafficking, labor violations, prostitution, or assault at all. But most of the time, ICE, the FBI, and politicians will use linguistic maneuvering to make it sound as if all the arrests were for sex crimes. (See also: “Trump’s mythical crackdown on sex trafficking.”)

If you actually read beyond the headlines about federal “anti-trafficking” initiates touting big results, you’ll see that these almost never involve human trafficking charges and if they do, it’s a small fraction of the total arrests. Instead, these stings and raids are used to check people’s papers and arrest anyone they can for immigration violations, prostitution, drug possession, or other low-level offenses of the sort that can still get legal immigrants deported.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is right that President Donald Trump “tries to use” the issue of sex trafficking “to justify his wall.” But Kristof somehow still thinks that empowering the Justice Department to “prosecute pimps more aggressively” will fall fairly on serious criminals and not also be used as a pretense to target disfavored groups. Under a Trump administration, that will inevitably fall on communities where federal agents think they may find people running afoul of immigration laws.

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— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 5, 2019

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QUICK HITS

• Read the whole State of the Union speech here if you’re a masochist.

• Here’s more on Trump’s false crusade against trafficking, from The New Yorker.

• And more Reason State of the Union Coverage:

• The State of the Union Is Rockets, Socialism, Alliteration, and Nazis: Podcast
• The Rhetorical and Substantive Limits of Trump’s American Greatness
• What Was Missing From Trump’s State of the Union? America’s $1 Trillion Deficit
• Trump Denounces ‘Endless War,’ Teases Aggressive Stance on Venezuela in SOTU Address

• Good morning from Twitter:

What if they want to be sex workers or do some mushrooms, Ms. Politician? https://t.co/J5Bq4MA1eJ

— Franklin Harris (@FranklinH3000) February 6, 2019

That’s Ms. Cop Politician to you.

— I’m Korg. This is my friend Miek. (@SederVCU) February 6, 2019

President Donald Trump reiterated his usual calls for crackdowns on illegal immigration and an increase in border security during the State of the Union address last night. But there was a small surprise in the immigration section of his speech: His statement that he wants immigrants to enter the country legally and in “the largest numbers ever.”

That would be excellent news. More legal immigration is a far more effective cure for illegal border flows than physical barriers. Why? Because if people can come to the country legally to work, they would have no need to do so illegally, especially since working without proper authorization brings a 17 percent wage penalty.

Sadly, however, there are at least three reasons why one shouldn’t get too excited about Trump’s statement:

One: He was ad libbing. The official transcript of the speech circulated in advance merely said: “I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally.” So the POTUS was off-script. Clearly, the phrase hadn’t been vetted by Stephen Miller, the ultra-restrictionist White House aide who is the architect of his immigration policy.

Two: Washington Post’s Robert Costa reminds us that Trump made similar declarations when he launched his presidential bid in 2015 only to back off when Miller and Steven Bannon called him out. There was a time when the Republican base made a distinction between legal and illegal immigration—favoring the first while opposing the second. Those days are gone. It is not a coincidence that during the government shutdown last January, Trump demanded a 40 percent cut in legal immigration by scrapping the diversity visa program and scaling back family-based immigration in exchange for legalizing Dreamers (folks who have grown up in this country as Americans after being brought here without authorization as minors).

Three: Trump’s record to date does not indicate he is any friend of legal immigration. Indeed, he has used every regulatory and administrative tool at his disposal to reduce every single category of legal immigration.

Here is a non-comprehensive list:

• He has outlawed asylum for those fleeing gang violence. Meanwhile, he has made it difficult for Central American migrants to present themselves at official ports of entry and request asylum by engaging in a practice called metering—meaning forcing them to wait for days and weeks on the other side of the border—while making it a criminal offense if they try and seek asylum between ports of entry.
• He has nearly wiped out America’s refugee program. His administration cut the refugee cap from 110,000 to 45,000 and is not even close to filling even that limit.
• He couldn’t convince Congress to cut back family-based immigration. However, he has used his travel ban for that purpose. He has barred Americans from sponsoring family members from any of the five Muslim countries listed on the ban. In theory, the State Department is supposed to hand waivers from the ban to close family members—spouses and children—on a case-by-case basis. But in the first few months after the ban, it had approved a measly 430 waivers out of 6,555 eligible applicants.
• He has not even spared high-skilled immigrants who virtually everyone thinks are good for the country, including hard-to-please folks at the National Review such as Reihan Salam. He has smothered the H-1B high-skilled guest worker program in so much red tape as to make it virtually unusable. His administration is issuing more “requests for evidence” from employers sponsoring foreign workers. This means that companies have to submit even more paperwork to prove to the government that they really need the immigrant’s services and couldn’t find a qualified American to do the job. Worse, even as his administration is requiring employers to jump through more hoops, it is denying more H-1B requests. Nor is it allowing H-1Bs to renew their visas every three years as a matter of routine, which has been the case to date. It is forcing the visa holder and the sponsoring employer to re-file all the paperwork, as if they were applying for the first time. And, in direct contradiction to his lofty declaration in his SOTU that more women working is a good thing, he is on track to scrap work authorization for the spouses of H-1B holders, most of whom tend to be highly qualified. Given that greencard wait times for those from India and China spans decades, without this authorization, they will essentially be frozen out of the labor market permanently and become involuntary housewives, as I noted in this New York Times piece.

As I wrote in a recently in The New York Times, contrary to current mythology, America is a low-immigration nation. America’s share of the foreign born ranks 34th among 50 countries with a per capita GDP of $20,000. And if it doesn’t admit 2 million immigrants every year—more than twice its current rate—between now and 2050 to offset the country’s plummeting birth rates and aging population, it will face a massive economic slowdown in a decade because of a shortage of workers.

If Trump is serious about allowing more legal immigration, he might want to consider a market-based system where immigrants are able to obtain visas in exchange for a fee large enough to offset any negative fiscal impact or negative externalities that they might impose. Immigrants, on balance, are a net positive for the economy as even an immigration skeptic like Harvard University’s George Borjas admits. But if immigrants have to pay a fee to address the perception that they impose costs, then so be it. That’s still better than simply slamming the door—both for them and the United States.

President Trump likes to win. This would be a win-win.

After a drug raid killed a middle-aged couple and injured five narcotics officers in Houston last week, the head of the local police union blamed people who criticize cops, while the police chief blamed politicians who fail to support the gun control policies he favors. The real cause, Jacob Sullum says, was a fundamentally immoral war on drugs that routinely requires violence in response to peaceful activities.

Hours after the deadly attack on the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, condemned “the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy.” He warned that “we’re going to be keeping track of all y’all,” and “we’re going to be holding you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.”

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo later rebuked Gamaldi for his “over-the-top” remarks, saying, “This had nothing to do with any of the stuff that he was talking about.” Yet Acevedo could not resist tossing out his own red herring by criticizing “elected officials” who fail to address the “proliferation of firearms in the hands of people that have no business having guns.”

View this article.

An Australian police officer has been sentenced to six months in jail for illegally using police databases to snoop on potential dates. Adrian Trevor Moore looked up information on 92 women he met on dating websites. His attorney says he was trying to do “due diligence” before deciding whether to meet the women in person. But Moore accessed information on several of the women multiple times over a number of years.

Immediately after President Donald Trump stepped down from the dias at his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman grabbed their podcasting mics to talk rockets, socialism, American greatness, alliteration, uteruses, and Nazis.

We give props to some high points in the speech (“Great nations do not fight endless wars.”) We note some encouraging hints about Trump’s possible legacy as a criminal justice reformer (“Alice’s story underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing—and the need to remedy this injustice.”) We also ponder the possibility of a massive new entitlement (“I am also proud to be the first president to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave—so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.”) And we ultimately fret about a vision of national greatness that relies on illegal immigrants and nations who want to sell us cheap stuff as the enemies that will bind us together.

Body Language by Asthmatic Astronaut is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Audio production by Mark McDaniel

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Give President Donald Trump his due. His State of the Union Address employed a positive rhetoric almost always lacking from his major addresses and he rightly touted some of his administration’s accomplishments, including the passage of the FIRST STEP Act, cutting regulations, and improving many aspects of the tax code. Halfway through his first term, only his most deranged critics can continue to claim that his election still represents an “extinction-level threat” to the American experiment.

Yet simply because he’s not the unmitigated disaster his worst detractors fear and has delivered an uplifting speech doesn’t mean his policy agenda is perfect. Far from it. The vast majority of us—72 percent, according to Gallup—are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and Trump’s presidency is both an effect and cause of this long-term trend.

To his credit, Trump recognizes that the 21st century demands new approaches to policy challenges. We must, he said,

step boldly and bravely into the next chapter of this great American adventure. We must create a new standard of living for the 21st century. An amazing quality of life for all of our citizens is within reach. We can make our communities safer, our families stronger, our culture richer, our faith deeper, and our middle class bigger and more prosperous than ever before.

Toward the end of his speech, he again returned to the need to look forward:

What will we do with this moment? How will we be remembered? This is the time to reignite the American imagination.

It’s disappointing, then, that Trump offered virtually no new solutions to major problems. Yes, he is easily the best president to date on the issue of school choice, but it’s also true that the federal government cannot the major driver on that issue. And it is nothing less than thrilling to hear any president, but especially one in 2019, after 18 years of failure, say bluntly, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”

But on virtually every other issue, Trump is pushing old-school, 20th-century-or-older policies that have little to do with shrinking the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. Indeed, among his biggest impacts has been to increase spending and explode an already historically high debt. He is every bit as locked into a model that would centralize and aggregate power in the hands of the few.

Unsuprisingly, he pushed for his border wall, which addresses the nonexistent problem of crossings in the middle of nowhere (apprehensions on the border with Mexico started dropping in 2000). The fixation on illegal immigration comes at a time when the number of illegals is at its lowest total in a decade. Illegals and asylum seekers have not proven to be any sort of terrorist threat. The one comforting element of Trump’s discussion of immigration is that he said, “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” That’s a major change in rhetoric, one at odds with the predilection of leading GOP senators such as Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and Sonny Perdue (R–Ga.) and his own adviser Stephen Miller, all of whom are pushing to cut legal immigration by 50 percent.

The president’s defense of trade protectionism and his attack on NAFTA is similarly old-fashioned. He can claim that NAFTA is the worst trade deal ever, but there is zero evidence for such a charge. Most analyses of the deal found it to have a modest and positive impact on the U.S. economy, increasing GDP by 0.2 to 0.3 percent, or $50 billion, annually. No one except the president is under the misimpression that the deal he negotiated to replace NAFTA, the USMCA, is anything but a mostly cosmetic update. While Trump can talk tough about China, there’s little doubt that his trade war has, to date, hurt Americans. The Tax Foundation found that, by the end of 2018, “we had already paid $42 billion in higher taxes due to tariffs.”

It wasn’t so long ago—not more than two or three years, really—that it was unthinkable that a Republican president would be pushing for paid family leave. Yet there was Trump, arguing for such a mandate. We can assume that Republicans were against the policy because they recognize it is a great example of unintended consequences, that it is both unnecessary and harmful to the women it is supposed to help. As Veronique de Rugy wrote for Reason last year, the private sector has already been expanding paid leave for first-time mothers. In the 1960s, she wrote, only about 16 percent of women had access to it; now, it’s over 50 percent. “As much as we would love for everyone to get paid leave,” de Rugy concludes, “a government-provided solution to the issue won’t result in the proverbial free lunch that supporters hope for. It’s likely to have minimal effect, as the new benefit will be offset over time by lower wages. It could also give an incentive to employers to discriminate against childbearing-age workers for the benefits of older workers.”

“We have not yet begun to dream,” the president intoned in the final section of his speech, reaching for a lofty, future-oriented rhetoric that’s a welcome change from his routinely dystopian invocations of “American carnage.” But most of his policy solutions are relics of the past that have been tried and failed (such as protectionism) and even his choices of topics seem stuck in the 20th century. Deaths from AIDS, for instance, peaked in the 1990s and the disease is now seen more as a manageable, chronic condition that a public-health emergency. His emphasis on World War II—among other flourishes, he acknowledged three soldiers who participated in D-Day—was as emotionally manipulative as it was intellectually lazy. There is no question that World War II marked a turning point in the nation’s history, but it also marked the end of the “America First” movement and mentality that Trump is trying to revive.

You can’t drive boldly into the future with your eyes glued to the rear-view mirror. But in all too many ways, that’s exactly what President Trump seems to be doing.

“We have unleashed a revolution in American energy—the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world,” declared President Donald Trump in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. While Trump’s paean to our country’s robust oil and gas industry will incense Keep It in the Ground activists, even the Green New Deal Congressional resolution currently being crafted recognizes that banning fossil fuels is not feasible.

Oil and natural gas production in the U.S. is indeed soaring. According to the latest Energy Information Administration report, U.S. crude oil production stands at 11.9 million barrels per day. That’s just shy of 24 percent more than the 1970 peak of 9.6 million barrels per day. So much for Hubbert’s Peak!

And the U.S. is certainly number one: Saudi Arabia and Russia produce about 10.8 and 11 million barrels per day, respectively.

The U.S. is also now the world’s biggest producer of natural gas, at about 853 billion cubic meters in the last 12 months. The next biggest producers in 2017 were Russia and Iran at 694 and 209 billion cubic meters correspondingly.

Trump also claimed that “for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy.” He is evidently referring to oil exports and imports. This is a bit more complicated.

As Forbes energy commentator Robert Rapier noted in December, the U.S. consumes the equivalent of 20 million barrels of oil per day. That implies a shortfall of about 8 million barrels of oil per day. That gap is filled with a mixture of natural gas liquids, ethanol, and finished product exports and imports.

Even taking these other fuels into account, Rapier finds that the U.S. still consumes 2 million barrels per day more of petroleum products than we produce. Still, it is a remarkable achievement that daily U.S. imports have steeply fallen from a peak of 10.5 million barrels per day in 2004.

America is running a near-record deficit despite close to a decade of continuous economic growth—and the nation’s $22 trillion national debt is on a trajectory that will see it reach 93 percent of the nation’s economy by the end of the next decade, higher than it was during World War II (and far beyond that in the decades to come).

That’s the kind of problem that you might expect to be part of a serious and significant policy speech like the annual State of the Union address. But there was no mention Tuesday night of the urgent need to bring federal spending in line with tax revenue, and no discussion of how to curb the long-term growth of entitlement programs. About the only mention of spending at all, in fact, was a promise to “outspend” China militarily.

The Congressional Budget Office now says that America won’t run a $1 trillion deficit until 2020—after some earlier projections estimated we’d hit that mark in the current fiscal year—but the temporary reprieve means little. While discretionary spending is set to decline by 1.3 percent over the next 10 years, the entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, and the interest on the national debt, will continue to push the deficit higher.

The decision to steer clear of the federal budget in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address was not a mistake. Asked earlier on Tuesday about whether Trump would discuss the national debt in the speech, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney—the same Mick Mulvaney who made his name in Congress as a budget hawk—reportedly told reporters that “no one cares.”

The deficit is not a sexy issue and it’s not something that’s likely to get solved quickly. It doesn’t make for a good soundbite. And, of course, talking about something in the State of the Union Address is not the same as actually doing something.

Still, the talking matters. Acknowledging the size of the problem is a first step towards tackling it, and Trump refused to take that step on Tuesday night. It’s unlikely Congress will act without considerable prodding—or until the debt becomes too large for the economy to bear, something that might happen by the end of the next decade, when the national debt will near the size of the economy as a whole.

Indeed, if the policies outlined in Trump’s State of the Union address were to become reality, it would likely be bad news for the federal budget deficit. He promised to spend more money on the military (including on nuclear weapons), and to build his coveted border wall. Still, to be fair to the president, there have been many, many State of the Union speeches that have promised more spending—and rarely is deficit reduction on the menu. It’s also not difficult to imagine a future Democratic president using the State of the Union to call for Medicare for All, which would only compound the entitlement spending that’s driving much of the deficit.

Our days of being able to ignore the national debt and the entitlement programs continue to tick away.

The nearly forgotten issue of infrastructure crept into President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, with Trump touting his administration’s record of approving new pipelines and calling for additional federal investment.

“Both parties should be able to unite for a great rebuilding of America’s crumbling infrastructure,” said Trump. “I know that the Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill—and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment. This is not an option. This is a necessity.”

Prior to the speech, Republican and Democratic lawmakers suggested new infrastructure spending was something both parties could get behind.

I’m hoping to hear *real* bipartisanship from the President tonight. We should be working *together* to invest in infrastructure, to improve access to quality, affordable health care, to strengthen our country abroad and at home, and so much more. #SOTU pic.twitter.com/MLY7WZpNKt

— Senator Chris Coons (@ChrisCoons) February 5, 2019

Look forward to hearing from @POTUS about his plans to rebuild our infrastructure, improve #job training programs, tackle unfair trade w/ #China, and address high prescription drug prices. #SOTU https://t.co/NNPa8EaY7g

— Rob Portman (@senrobportman) February 5, 2019

The president made strikingly similar comments in his last State of the Union address, in which he called for a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package, replete with $200 billion in new federal spending.

His 2018 proposal was followed by a detailed plan from the White House. That plan included $100 billion in federal aid to state and local projects that could fund 80 percent of their costs from non-federal sources. Some $50 billion would have gone to ill-defined rural infrastructure projects. Another $20 billion would have been made available for a “Transformative Projects Program.”

His previous plan also called for streamlining government approval of infrastructure projects, and allowing for tolling and the commercialization of rest stops along America’s interstate highways.

Democrats countered with a plan that would have spent $1 trillion of federal dollars on everything from roads and bridges to broadband and affordable housing. Notably lacking was any mention of the administration’s regulatory rollback and streamlining.

Neither proposal came to anything, as Trump quickly becaume distracted with other priorities, and Democrats lacked a Congressional majority (or a realistic funding source) to get their plan through.

Something similiar will likely happen again this year, given that no major new infrastructure bills have been introduced in Congress so far, and there have been few indications that the current divided, polarized Congress is willing to take up a significant bipartisan project like a national infrastructure overhaul.