georgephillip
Diamond Member
- Dec 27, 2009
- 43,770
- 5,202
The $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan recently put forth will triple the costs of providing infrastructure services and price US cities and states out of the market if its implemented. "It would vastly raise the cost of living and doing business rather than making things easier for the population."
Simon Patten knew better long before Trump was born according to this Michael Hudson interview:
Trump Privatizes America
"MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to begin with, the way that Trump’s plan is to be financed would triple the cost of what the engineers say, to $22 trillion. The reason is that it’s a Thatcherite privatization scheme. Its economic philosophy reverses the last 150 years of public infrastructure in America. In fact, it’s the biggest attack on industrial capitalism in over 100 years.
"America’s first professor of economics at the first business school – Simon Patten, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School – said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production.
"But it’s not like labor, land, and capital, because the role of public infrastructure is not to make a profit.
"It’s role is to provide public services that are basic for the economy’s living standards and capacity to produce, and to provide these at a subsidized rate.
"That’s how America got rich and came to dominate the world industrial economy: by publicly subsidizing its basic costs: Low-cost roads, and low-cost other infrastructure.
"The government bore these costs so that public infrastructure would subsidize the economy to lower the cost of doing business.
Simon Patten knew better long before Trump was born according to this Michael Hudson interview:
Trump Privatizes America
"MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to begin with, the way that Trump’s plan is to be financed would triple the cost of what the engineers say, to $22 trillion. The reason is that it’s a Thatcherite privatization scheme. Its economic philosophy reverses the last 150 years of public infrastructure in America. In fact, it’s the biggest attack on industrial capitalism in over 100 years.
"America’s first professor of economics at the first business school – Simon Patten, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School – said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production.
"But it’s not like labor, land, and capital, because the role of public infrastructure is not to make a profit.
"It’s role is to provide public services that are basic for the economy’s living standards and capacity to produce, and to provide these at a subsidized rate.
"That’s how America got rich and came to dominate the world industrial economy: by publicly subsidizing its basic costs: Low-cost roads, and low-cost other infrastructure.
"The government bore these costs so that public infrastructure would subsidize the economy to lower the cost of doing business.