‘W
hen you talk about building, you had better talk about Trump,” writes Donald Trump in his 2015 book, Crippled America. Nothing has played a more central role in Trump’s argument that he’s the man to restore America to its former greatness than the idea that he is a master builder. He has insisted throughout his presidential campaign that his experience negotiating real-estate deals, constructing skyscrapers, and developing luxury hotels gives him the chops to solve the nation’s problems in a way that “all talk, no action” politicians could not.
During the campaign, Trump’s background as a builder has been most associated with his pledge to build a border wall to be paid for by Mexico. But beyond immigration policy, Trump has also talked repeatedly about how his background as a builder would be essential to transforming the nation’s infrastructure. He has criticized U.S. infrastructure as “terrible” and “a disgrace” more worthy of the Third World. Comparing the U.S. unfavorably with China, he said at a March rally in Maine, “They have trains that go 300 miles an hour. We have trains that go: Chug. Chug. Chug.” As president, Trump has vowed that, “fixing the country’s infrastructure would be a major priority project.”
Infrastructure is one of the areas in which Trump has most clearly broken with conservative policy orthodoxy. Talking about massive public-works projects is consistent with the Keynesian view of government spending as being the key to boosting economic growth, and it also fits in with liberals’ romantic notion of a government that can do “big things” (as President Obama has put it). Though most conservatives spent the Obama era opposing his public-works agenda, Trump was an early booster.
“It looks like we have somebody that knows what he is doing finally in office,” Trump said in February 2009 following Obama’s first prime-time press conference, in which Obama talked about his economic stimulus plan. In addition to the tax component, Trump said, “building infrastructure, building great projects, putting people to work in that sense is also very good.”
In his campaign manifesto Crippled America, Trump further embraced infrastructure spending as a form of stimulus. “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that stimulates the economy better than construction,” he wrote. Free-market economists have long argued that massive government spending on infrastructure, at best, acts as a short-lived sugar high, but, at worst, does lasting damage to the economy by distorting incentives, crowding out private investment, and adding to the nation’s debt burden. As Obama learned, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”
Trump insists in his book, “Our airports, bridges, water tunnels, power grids, rail systems—our nation’s entire infrastructure is crumbling, and we aren’t doing anything about it.” But his notion that nothing is being done about the nation’s infrastructure is inconsistent with the actual data, which show that government at all levels spent $416 billion on infrastructure in 2014, representing about 2.4 percent of GDP, according to the CBO, which noted: “Public spending over the past three decades has been fairly stable at 2.4 percent.” (It peaked at 3 percent in 1959 when the interstate highway system was being built.)
A Trump presidency would aim to spend a lot more as part of “the greatest long-term building project in American history,” but he has been vague about how he intends to pay for it.
Trump concedes that “this is going to be an expensive investment, no question about that.” But he does not elaborate on any sort of creative plans for financing such spending—say, privatizing some projects such as toll roads or charging user fees. Instead, he writes: “We need to put together a variety of sources to get it done. In some places there need to be bonds issued.” But issuing bonds, even if states and local governments could find eager buyers, would merely create more debt at a time when they are already facing crushing budgetary pressures from Medicaid, education, and pension obligations, among other mounting expenses.
Furthermore, it’s difficult to square Trump’s ambitious talk on infrastructure with his broader comments on the budget. One of the main reasons there isn’t more money available to invest in major projects is that the federal government is burdened by spending on entitlement programs, which Trump has said he doesn’t want to change. He also recently told the Washington Post that he would wipe out the nation’s $19 trillion debt within eight years. The prospect would already be mathematically impossible without serious cuts to entitlements, but it would be even further out of reach were he to pursue his public-works vision.
All of this brings us back to the idea of Trump as a great builder. In writing about his plans to fix the nation’s infrastructure, Trump argues that his experience renovating Wollman ice-skating rink in New York City’s Central Park, building apartments on the West Side of Manhattan, and constructing a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C. show that he could fix the nation’s infrastructure.
To rebuild, “you need someone who knows how to deal with unions and suppliers and, without any doubt, lawyers,” Trump writes. “I deal with them all each day, and I don’t lose to them.” He explains: “When I build a project, I watch the money.”
However, as president, Trump would be charged with overseeing foreign and domestic affairs. He wouldn’t have much time to sit down and haggle over concrete and steel prices for every construction project across the country. Furthermore, all spending has to go through both chambers of Congress, and government projects are subject to a ton of regulations, such as those governing the use of union labor, which naturally drive up costs.
This gets to the broader danger in thinking that Trump could make the leap to president because of his background in business. The president does not “run” the economy. Leftist presidents may want the government to take a more active role in managing the economy, but conservative presidents fight to remove government barriers so that individuals and businesses can create and innovate. Trump wants to claim the mantle of the latter but his every inclination is to behave like the former.