PRESS RELEASE
President Trump Says Public-Private Partnerships Won’t Work for Infrastructure Development; Time for LaRouche’s Policy!
Sept. 27, 2017 (EIRNS)—According to the Washington Post and several other media, when President Trump met with a bipartisan group of legislators from the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday, he indicated that public-private partnerships, known as P3s, don’t work as a means of financing infrastructure development. An unnamed White House official told the Post that although the administration has researched these approaches, "they are certainly not the silver bullet for all of our nation’s infrastructure problems, and we will continue to consider all viable options."
What the President determines now, as to how to finance the $1 trillion infrastructure program he announced at the beginning of his administration, remains to be seen. But, this puts on the table (where it has always been) consideration of the Hamiltonian credit policy that Lyndon LaRouche has proposed, as the only viable means to finance the country’s economic reconstruction.
Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), who attended the meeting, said he thought that the President’s remarks signalled an openness to working with Democrats on the plan, and even increasing the federal commitment. During the meeting, Higgins reported, Trump indicated he would seek to pay for infrastructure projects through direct federal spending, either by paying for projects with new tax revenues or by taking on new debt. In a telephone interview with Bloomberg News, Higgins offered the view that after eight months in which the Senate and House leadership failed to work with the President on overhauling healthcare, he now "feels liberated to find partnerships different from the one that hasn’t worked in the past eight months."
During yesterday’s session, according to those present, Trump pointed to one glaring example of P3 failure in Vice President Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana, to demonstrate that this approach on the federal level won’t work. After a private Spanish firm failed to complete a stretch of the Indiana interstate highway 69, the state is now issuing public debt to complete the 40% of the project that the Spanish firm left undone.
