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Trump's New Infrastructure Plan Calls For Selling Off Two Airports (politico.com)
The Trump administration has released an infrastructure plan on Monday that proposes that the federal government considers selling off Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport. According to Trump's blueprint, the administration wants to allow federal agencies to divest assets if they "can demonstrate an increase in value from the sale would optimize the taxpayer value for federal assets." It also includes the George Washington and Baltimore Washington parkways, the Washington Aqueduct and the transmission assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Bonneville Power Administration on the list for "potential divesture." Politico reports: State and local agencies or the private sector may be better at managing assets currently owned by the federal government, the administration argues, and federal agencies should be able to "identify appropriate conditions under which sales would be made." They should also "delineate how proceeds would be spent." Under the administration's proposal, federal agencies would have to complete an analysis demonstrating an "increase in value from divestiture." Though technically owned by the federal government, both airports are operated by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority under a long-term lease agreement. The 53-page infrastructure plan lays out a vision to turn $200 billion in federal money into $1.5 trillion for fixing America's infrastructure by leveraging local and state dollars and private investment. "The White House says its plan will create $1.5 trillion for repairing and upgrading America's infrastructure," reports CNNMoney. "Only $200 billion of that, however, would come from direct federal spending. The rest is supposed to come from state and local governments, which are expected to match any federal allocation by at least a four-to-one ratio. States have gradually assumed more of the responsibility for funding infrastructure in recent years, and the White House says it wants to accelerate that trend."
As for how the money would be split up, the plan says that half of the new federal money, $100 billion, "would be parceled out as incentives to local government entities," reports CNNMoney. "An additional $20 billion would go toward 'projects of national significance' that can 'lift the American spirit,'" while another $50 billion will be designated "for rural block grants, most of which will be given to states according to a formula based on the miles of rural roads and the rural population they have," reports CNNMoney. "The rest of the money would support other infrastructure-related undertakings..."
As for how the money would be split up, the plan says that half of the new federal money, $100 billion, "would be parceled out as incentives to local government entities," reports CNNMoney. "An additional $20 billion would go toward 'projects of national significance' that can 'lift the American spirit,'" while another $50 billion will be designated "for rural block grants, most of which will be given to states according to a formula based on the miles of rural roads and the rural population they have," reports CNNMoney. "The rest of the money would support other infrastructure-related undertakings..."
I can't wait for the "de-platforming" trolls to find out that "they own it, so you have to do what they say" becomes incredibly problematic in real world contexts.
The official home of Pepsi ... and the leader of the free world
https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
This is how you turn the first world into the third world
The private sector KNOWS how to run things. We just need a few user fees.
-Parking garage entrance fee
-Parking garage exit fee
-Airport entrance fee
-Airport exit fee
-Airport Security Fee
-Fee payment Fee
-Fee payment fee recovery fee
-Fee payment fee recovery fee surcharge
-Fee payment fee recovery fee surcharge levy
-Fee payment fee recovery fee surcharge levy premium
They should charge for WiFi bandwidth by the byte, say the same as a text message fee, but with a premium.
-Stuff at the airport is too cheap, as proof, even the poors can afford to fly. Poors should have to take the bus everywhere, or at least need a loan to fly.
-Passport fees should also increase.
I presume he already has a couple of friends lined up to buy them ?
In other words, government agencies are now expected to put a dollar value on their historic icons, landmark infrastructure, and carefully-controlled limited-development areas, and sell them to the highest bidders, then turn around and give that money to the federal government to cover tax cuts for the companies who just bought our society.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
While the document doesn't specifically mention projects that "lift the American spirit," we all know that there's a certain parade that a certain country also did that a certain someone thinks will lift everyone's spirits in just the right way. You know that's what he wants, and this is the perfect way to pay for it. I mean, you've got to fix the road first before you can have a parade, right?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
his "Infrastructure Plan" is to give away vast amounts of infrastructure so the folks that helped elect him can profit from it (after the public paid to build it). Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. The frustrating thing is that it's going to take decades to undo the damage this crap causes. Hopefully enough opposition gets into Congress to stop him from selling off the interstate roads. I'm not looking forward to $20 in tolls just to get to work every morning, but I can guarantee you somebody is.
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Instead, of selling critical infrastructure to businesses, make sure the bidding process to build & maintain those things is based on solid business foundations. There's too much crony-ism in the bidding process, too much bias toward existing contractors regardless of performance.
Trump could do anything. Especially run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody's gonna pay for it anyway. And as soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move the stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a two hundred dollar case of booze and you sell it for a hundred. It doesn't matter. It's all profit. And then finally, when there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.
Fuck you, pay me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In other words, Trump isn't doing a goddamned thing, is doing his standard trick of making other people spend their money and take the risk while he puts his name on it, and is going to transfer public assets into private assets. This is pretty much how he built all of his other failed ventures.
This is such a bullshit 'plan' it defies belief ... because Trump is a crook and thief who apparently can't do math.
But in the mean time he'll be sure people are dying in the streets because they have no healthcare, but his rich asshole friends all get tax breaks.
I swear, the economics trotted out by Republicans is a complete fantasy most of the time.
So his way of paying for it is by forcing the states to match him at least 4:1?
This works incredibly well. For example, the federal Department of Education doles out a minuscule fraction compared to state and local spending but every school district fights tooth and nail and adopts basically whatever testing procedures, etc, the feds dictate for those incremental funds.
There's a big difference between selling excess unused assets (e.g. closed military bases) and selling active assets (e.g. TVA). The former is just not letting buildings rot. The latter is potentially privatizing essential services.
The thing is, this is one of those ideas that sounds a lot better in theory than in practice. I mean, in theory, selling it to the various states that buy power from TVA might work. The problem is that you'd have no single legislative body that could control it, and getting several state legislatures to agree is even harder than getting Congress to agree. So in practice, that's not likely to work very well. And that's the only possible sale that wouldn't represent a high risk of causing the complete economic collapse of the entire South. After all, TVA's low-cost electricity is a major factor in keeping those states' manufacturing industries competitive with China, Mexico, etc.
The alternative — selling TVA to a private company — would be disastrous. If a conditions of sale was that TVA continued to be operated as a non-profit, nobody who could afford it would want it, because it would mean a lot of extra risk on the book for no financial benefit. And if they didn't make that one of the conditions, then... well, it takes a special kind of stupid to take a well-functioning nonprofit power company and sell it to a for-profit entity so that every single man, woman, and child in the southern United States can pay significantly more for the exact same electricity that they have now.
So proposing the privatization of TVA should raise more than a few eyebrows among anyone living in any of the states that it serves.
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Divesture of surplus military bases from the WW2 and cold war eras has been going on for decades, spanning the tenure of presidents of various stripes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure/
This is a whole other kettle of fish.
Were that I say, pancakes?
It is the only way you are ever going to see Trump International Airport.
Sydney's airport was sold to Maquarie bank and now has the dubious distinction of having the most expensive parking of any airport in the world!
They also financially engineered the transaction so they haven't spent on taxes in the history of the project.
Don't do it.
So with regards to the selling of federal assets: It may be that the private market will game the system better with the extra control they have over the most valuable assets... they'll let buildings run down even more and charge even higher fees because it's really expensive and time consuming to build another airport near Washington DC... and if you start, they'll wait until you're underway and then cut their pricing to bankrupt your project and then raise prices even higher afterwards.
Yeah, sell the assets once to get a lump sum now, pay from now to eternity "leasing" it back. We'll see how the state's and city's budgets will look like in 10 years for the ones that sold their legislative offices to private enterprise so they can lease them back...
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. What proponents of privatization often fail to account for is that large infrastructure projects don't lend themselves well to free market competition.
Read up on all the controversies around the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Ontario... and get ready for owners of private infrastructure to pull that same crap hundreds of times over across hundreds of other bridges, roads, and waterways across America.
Want to build a competitor to DCA within reasonable distance of the Washington DC metro area? Good luck. In many places it's not just a question of land acquisition... there are many locations where local geography limits where airports can be built or where bridges can cross rivers. Look at the terrain around Pittsburgh... want to build another international airport there, maybe closer to the city? I'd like to see someone try.
I HATE planning roadtrips across Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma... not because of all the stereotypes about flyover country (I actually love the scenery), but because of all the damn toll roads. For each road, I have to figure out: do they take cash, are they toll by plate (with a hefty surcharge for being unregistered), or do they use any of a number of incompatible tolling systems? If I register my rental car's tags in one city will my registration be valid in another? And avoiding the tolls in places like Kansas just to cross the state means you have to go MILES out of your way on two lane roads. Is it reasonable to expect that someone will be able to raise enough money to build a competing toll road, parallel to an existing one? In contrast, I can drive anywhere in a dozen northeastern states and know that any toll road will take EZpass.
There's a big lake near my house that TVA sold off to a private company some years ago. Sure, the buyers spent money fixing up boat ramps and picnic areas... but then they decided to drain the lake for a year to do some maintenance on the dam. Now, if this were still government land it would be common sense to expect that you explore the lake bed at your own risk (people do that anyway when the lake is drawn down for the winter), but since the lake was now private property, the company used trespassing laws to enforce a complete closure of the entire lake and all adjacent land. And who did they use to enforce the closure? The local sheriff's department.
As an Australian that moved to the US a few years ago and does a lot of flying for work, I'm on the fence when it comes to airport privatisation proposals. One of the interesting differences between the US and Australia is that, despite the fact that the US is generally more in favour of private sector delivery of services (think healthcare etc.), it has overwhelmingly kept its airports publically owned. Most major airports in the US are publically owned, whereas I think every major Australian airport was privatised many years ago.
On the one hand Australian airports are wayyyy nicer than US airports. More modern and up to date, cleaner, more spacious, better and more facilities etc. Nicer places to be in by a long shot. US airports, especially some of the major ones (Newark and O'Hare spring to mind) are very overcrowded at peak times, straining at the seams and generally just more unpleasant places to be in (e.g. what's with those disgusting old seats and claustrophobically low ceilings in Concourses E/F at ORD?)
But why are they so much nicer? Because they charge a lot more and thus have a lot more money to pump into improvements. US airport parking fees, even in a major city, are a small fraction of what they are in Australia for instance. I could park at Chicago for a week for what it could cost for a few hours at SYD or MEL. Australian airports no doubt also charge the airlines more than their US counterparts too (landing fees etc.), which indirectly affects ticket prices etc.
So in terms of user experience, private airports seem nicer, but in terms of equity of accessibility to travel itself, publicly owned is the way to go. Prices go through the roof when airports are privatised, if Australia is anything to go by. Travel should not be only for the wealthy.
Yep, I'm going to point out a bridge. I drove over the I35 bridge in Minneapolis nearly every day coming home from work prior to it's collapse. It was dumb luck I didn't leave work 10 minutes later that day or I would likely have been on it when it went down.
But hey, if you don't want to take my anecdotal example, you can just go check transportation.gov and get a state by state breakdown of structurally deficient bridges yourself:
https://www.transportation.gov...
Now maybe you don't take much stock in their numbers, but personally after watching the bridge I made my daily commute over for years catastrophically collapse, I think it's worth at least considering that there may be some truth to these claims.
That bridge is literally the example in the article Jodka cited.
So "crumbling infrastructure" peddlers play on this concern by habitually agonizing over things like the impending outbreak of tragic bridge collapses that will kill thousands. They bring up tragedies like the 2007 disaster with the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis even though, according to federal investigators, the collapse was due to a design flaw rather than decaying infrastructure. Many outlets and politicians simply ignore the inconvenient fact that the rare fatality involving infrastructure typically has nothing to do with "crumbling" and everything to do with natural elements or human error.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."