Where I stopped resisiting Vox’s call to resist – it’s a matter of distance
November 10, 2018
I wasn't thrilled reading the title and intro to Yglesias' article, "House Democrats must resist Trump’s infrastructure trap":
Then it got better:
The key here is long distance power transmission. Yglesias argues for forcing Trump to break with his backers. I'm all in favor of forcing bad people to reveal the vile positions through symbolic votes, but I don't think forcing Trump to break with plutocrats is a realistic path to get actual policy change. OTOH, long distance transmission puts jobs in red and purple states and helps expand the market renewable energy sources in those states, and the less-ideological/more-pragmatic conservatives in those states kind of like that profit motive. Given that power transmission could even theoretically be used by massive nuclear power plants, that constituency could also provide a minor amount of support.
Clean transportation is another potential area of cooperation - there are some advantages to purple areas and profit-seeking corporate interests, but long distance transmission is a real opportunity and a very important need.
Final note - while a deal may help Trump's image, it won't improve the economic fundamentals in time for the November 2020 election. Speaking as someone involved in receipt of the Obama stimulus for water projects, it will take more than two years for real expenditures to happen, and a deal is months away from happening.
President Donald Trump’s infrastructure trap is back, and for the new House Democratic majority to succeed, they need to escape it.
It’s forgotten now, but in the transition winter of 2016-’17, a shockingly large and diverse set of congressional Democrats — from both the progressive and moderate wings of the party and including some key leaders — spent enormous time and energy making friendly noises toward Trump and suggesting that the result of his election should be some kind of bipartisan infrastructure deal.
....Trump rapidly fell into the clutches of congressional Republicans’ hard-right agenda. He continued to tout vaporware infrastructure plans, only to eventually come up with a scheme to make grants stingier and privatize some airports, which went nowhere.
But with Democrats now running the House of Representatives, infrastructure is back. And Trumpworld figures, looking at the polls, maybe Trump and the Democrats should come together around a random debt-financed increase in infrastructure spending that lets Trump regain his reputation as a dealmaker and lets Democrats say they accomplished something.
....Since Trump is not very subtle, his team even explicitly told a group of Washington Post reporters that the infrastructure dangle is a trap designed to weaken Democrats’ political position. But in case anyone doesn’t get the message: This is a trap designed to weaken Democrats’ political position.
....Democrats of course can’t categorically rule out the possibility of doing a legislative deal with him. But you also don't trade away the rule of law and the basic integrity of the American government for the sake of some pork barrel spending.
Then it got better:
....Democrats also can’t afford to let Trump tour the country complaining that all Democrats want to do is investigate him while he is trying to fix the country’s infrastructure.
....This requires Democrats to come up with a plan that is striking and visionary enough that normal people stand a chance of actually hearing about and understanding it. But it needs to also be genuinely transformative in a way that would make it legitimately worth doing on the off-chance that Trump somehow decides to agree to it. ....[T]he country (and the world) really does need a transformative infrastructure plan. If Trump is desperate enough for a deal, maybe he’d go for it.
But the key is to put ideas on the table that would genuinely alarm the conservative movement — and, more important, the corporate interests who stand behind it — and force Trump to make a serious choice about breaking with the plutocrats who prop up his regime or clearly standing in the way of an infrastructure transformation.
That means massive investments in clean energy generation and transmission, municipal broadband, a serious revival of airline competition, and competitive grants to states for carbon-cutting transportation programs.
....priority No. 1 for that congressional resistance should be developing a strategy to counter Trump on infrastructure.
The key here is long distance power transmission. Yglesias argues for forcing Trump to break with his backers. I'm all in favor of forcing bad people to reveal the vile positions through symbolic votes, but I don't think forcing Trump to break with plutocrats is a realistic path to get actual policy change. OTOH, long distance transmission puts jobs in red and purple states and helps expand the market renewable energy sources in those states, and the less-ideological/more-pragmatic conservatives in those states kind of like that profit motive. Given that power transmission could even theoretically be used by massive nuclear power plants, that constituency could also provide a minor amount of support.
Clean transportation is another potential area of cooperation - there are some advantages to purple areas and profit-seeking corporate interests, but long distance transmission is a real opportunity and a very important need.
Final note - while a deal may help Trump's image, it won't improve the economic fundamentals in time for the November 2020 election. Speaking as someone involved in receipt of the Obama stimulus for water projects, it will take more than two years for real expenditures to happen, and a deal is months away from happening.
