Republicans silent on Donald Trump’s $1 trillion stimulus plan
While there was outrage from the GOP when President Obama called for a massive stimulus bill, there is nothing from Republicans as their candidate, Donald Trump, claims he’ll call fro $1 trillion to be spent on roads and infrastructure.
“My contract calls for $1 trillion dollars in infrastructure investment, of which the inner cities will be a major beneficiary,” the Republican said Wednesday in Charlotte, N.C.
Hillary Clinton has staked out a plan for $275 billion in additional spending on infrastructure projects over five years, to be paid for with corporate taxes.
Trump’s outside economic adviser Wilbur Ross told Yahoo News “If there’s ever a great time to do it, it’s got to be now.”
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Trump would push Congress to authorize $137 billion in tax credits for construction companies looking to build new toll roads, toll bridges or any other sort of infrastructure project that has a revenue stream attached to it.
“It’s Keynesian in one sense that it’s more spending into the economy, but unlike (Clinton’s) thing, it’s spending without a tax increase,” Ross said in an interview last week. “It creates its own tax flow. Now, that is going to be a wildly controversial concept, because people never think about, well, if I build infrastructure, I will get tax revenue from it … but it’s a fact. It does take workmen to build infrastructure, they will pay tax.”
Peter Navarro predicted the proposal “will revolutionize how infrastructure is financed.”
Alan Cole, an economist at the independent Tax Foundation, said the proposal likely overrates the amount of tax revenue that would be generated by the private spending, partly because it appears to assume that every worker on the infrastructure projects was not working — or paying income taxes — previously.
“Her number is a fraction of what we’re talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure,” Trump said in August during an interview on the Fox Business Network. “I would say at least double her numbers, and you’re going to really need a lot more than that.”
“This is right out of the Obama playbook,” said Michael Sargent, a research associate at the Heritage Foundation. Sargent said it was “fairly ironic” for Trump to be touting a major infrastructure plan when he is simultaneously attacking Clinton for offering “more of the same” economic policies. “This is literally ‘more of the same’ of what she’s proposing,” he said in August.
Since then….silence.
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