In place of public roads and bridges, we'd have private roads and bridges. Think of America turning into giant, horizontal-like Trump Tower wherever you looked.
These tolls and fees won't come cheap. They'd have to be set high in order to satisfy the profit margins demanded by the developers and the investors who back them.
Worst of all, we'd get the wrong kind of infrastructure. Projects that will be most attractive to developers and investors are those whose tolls and fees bring in the biggest bucks -- giant mega-projects like major new through-ways and new bridges.
Developers and investors won't be interested in the thousands of smaller bridges, airports, pipes, and water treatment facilities across the country that are most in need of repair.
They're not likely to respond to the needs of rural communities and smaller cities and towns that are too small to generate the tolls and other user fees equity developers and investors seek.
They won't be attracted to the most important first priority for our nation's infrastructure: Better maintenance of what we already have. With improved maintenance, it wouldn't be necessary to completely rebuild.
But investors and developers want to build anew. They can't reap big rewards from maintenance.
Nor will they want to put their efforts and money into projects that don't yet have proven financial track records, like many clean energy innovations -- which, not incidentally, might have enabled us to meet our targets under the Paris climate accords, were we still part of the Paris accords.
We shouldn't have to pay twice over for the wrong infrastructure.
To really make America great again we need the correct infrastructure in the right places -- infrastructure that's for the public, not for big developers and investors.
Sorry, Donald. The only way we get this is if big corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes to support it.
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