The transportation bill does not need to be scrapped it. It needs to be re-thought. The government needs to bring in some private individuals and put them in a think tank where they can figure out a way to fund it privately.
It could be in a gas tax. It could be paid for by tolls. (Most of our bridges were originally toll bridges. Making them toll bridges was how we paid for them.) It could be paid for by some tax credits.
What if we put $500 million to $1.5 trillion in some kind of a tax credit for bond investing for people to invest in something that is going to take ten years to pay for such as a toll bridge or highway? People need to realize that once the bridge or highway is paid for the toll will go away. The toll would be short-term relatively speaking.
What if someone to put out a $1 trillion bond with a 15% tax credit to be funded and sold? This would more than likely come from Wall Street, but it sure would be nice to see some of that money go to work right now rather than just getting the rich richer, letting it sit there by just moving money.
Except for the new issues for new companies, we need to think about it in terms of putting some of that money to work. If you have a 15% tax credit, that would cost the taxpayer $150 billion to do a $ trillion transportation bill. How cheap is that for something we need? And we’d repay it with highway and bridge tolls.
The fact is we need to fix our streets and roads. We need to rebuild those bridges that need rebuilding. Our infrastructure needs to be taken care of. The transportation bill doesn’t need to die. It needs to be rethought.
I think the President needs to skip over the lawyers (Congress) and go directly to the people. The individual states can help here the most by providing better construction and entitlement management. But Trump needs to talk to the people who are impacted. He has ideas. We have ideas. If he talks to the people and we are on the same page, then Congress will have to get on the same page and do the right thing and come up with workable resolutions. We may even get health care reformed, DACA passed, immigration reform, and a wall built! But we need to talk directly to the people. Read the article “The Unpolitically Correct Response To Total Immigration From Our Readers”.
After all, new roads will need to be built to run alongside that new wall. Make it part of the new transportation bill.
