PRESS RELEASE
Schumer: Ready To Work with Trump, Fast, on $1 Trillion Plan
Dec. 2, 2016 (EIRNS)—In an interview carried in big-city press around New York State yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took a step to try to accelerate action on the $1 trillion national investment in new infrastructure which President-elect Trump promoted throughout his campaign.
Schumer told Syracuse.com the Democrats
"stand ready to work with the incoming administration to pass a major infrastructure bill with a trillion dollars in real Federal funding. This can be done within the first 100 days of the new Congress."
The paper said Schumer called for "substantial and direct Federal funding" and attacked "gimmicks."
"Schumer told Trump in a private meeting that [Trump’s] plan would lead to investment only in the most profitable projects and could lead to significantly higher tolls on privately owned roads and bridges. The senator said he told Trump ‘the bill needs to be stronger and bolder than ever before. Simple tax credits will not work.’"
The criticisms are quite true, and wouldn’t prevent a successful collaboration to commit $1 trillion to infrastructure investments over three years. But there are major problems, which should be attacked from the standpoint of the package of "Four Laws To Save the United States" conceptualized by EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche.
First, Schumer’s own idea of how to general entirely Federal funds for this large investment, is itself the kind of "tax giveaway" he is attacking in the plan of Trump’s presumptive Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Schumer specified a very low special tax rate for companies which repatriate cash they had stashed in offshore locations to avoid taxes.
Second, and more important, Schumer has thus far discussed nothing "stronger and bolder" than road widening, new municipal sewer systems, and localized rail development. Neither he nor Trump are yet in the universe of real technological and scientific frontiers for "infrastructure" development, which alone raise the overall productivity of the economy.
And third, there is no orientation to the new international development banks started by China, which has invested $1 trillion or more into new economic infrastructure in each of the last ten years.
