Trump takes aim at blue states in infrastructure plan

Another ploy to transfer wealth to the power elite.
State and local taxes are regressive, with people paying a larger percentage of income in taxes the smaller their income. Shifting the spending formula for infrastructure to 80% paid by state and local government will increase this unfairness.
And the proposal for "private" investment means toll roads and bridges, which is extremely regressive, and can make roads too expensive for lower-income people to afford to use.

And blue states tend to pay more federal taxes than they get back, the opposite is true for republican states that are largely rural. Trump's plan would increase this unfairness.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/12/trump-infrastructure-blue-states-transit-405993

By DANA RUBINSTEIN and RYAN HUTCHINS
02/12/2018

Major transportation projects in blue states may be in jeopardy in President Donald Trump’s 10-year infrastructure plan, which critics say favors little-populated rural areas to the detriment of urban America.

The White House isn’t being coy about where its priorities lie in the $1.5 trillion proposal, released Monday: Of the $200 billion in actual federal investment called for in the 10-year plan, one-quarter would go to rural areas for purposes as diverse as sewers, highways, airports and broadband. But only 14 percent of people in the U.S. live in non-metropolitan areas.

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"That's a very clear message that urban America is not of very much consequence, and, ironically, it's urban America that needs most of the infrastructure money," said Martin Robins, the founding director of Rutgers University's Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center in New Jersey.

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And it emphasizes finding ways to augment government funding with private sector money, which detractors say would invariably result in more tolls or other passenger fees. It's a tough assignment for public-transit projects that have little prospect of making money.

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he Trump administration wants to rely on local governments and private operators to do the heavy lifting, even as those same local governments — particularly in high-tax blue states — are grappling with the budgetary implications of Trump's tax code changes that took effect last month.

"The Republican tax bill was specifically designed to extract wealth from places that vote Democratic and shift it to places that vote Republican, and so that makes it extremely difficult for us to self-tax to make up for the cuts that are coming from the federal government," said Gabriel Metcalf, president and CEO of SPUR, a San Francisco Bay area-based urban policy think tank.

Trump's plan plays to his base in rural and small-town America, where nearly two thirds of voters chose him in 2016 over Democrat Hillary Clinton. He campaigned on promises of improving job prospects for the parts of the country where they have been dim.

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