A FRIEND POSTED THIS REITERATING THE BASIC CONCERN : Remembering that much touted public/private partnership to solve the infrastructure problem, a way to get past congressional deadlock..... More push for privatization and meetings are occurring. The infrastructure investment summit held last month by the Departments of the Treasury and Transportation appears likely to provide a boost to the privatization industry, ironically, just as privatized infrastructure is filing for bankruptcy. Chances are, whatever you were doing on September 9, 2014, (births and deaths excluded) will not affect your life as much as that summit, Expanding Our Nations Infrastructure Through Innovative Financing, did. Living through the era of Jamie Dimons creative financing might rightly make people suspicious of innovation. Indeed, rational people might want to return to the tried and true processes and relationships that, for decades, have provided our roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure instead of the innovations that now privatize the roads that were the poster children of privatization into bankruptcy, through a process that highway expert Randy Salzman recently exposed. That complex process uses the tax and bankruptcy codes and assumptions that private is always better than public to place as much as 97 percent of the costs on the public. Clearly something has gone wrong with turning to the private sector to provide our roads, bridges and other infrastructure, and this is an odd moment for two federal departments to spend their time and our money to hold a privatization investment summit. ............................................................................................................. Two things are particularly interesting about the summit conveners list of ways to finance transportation infrastructure: the narrow range of options and the exclusion of certain very viable options. The most important option that was omitted from discussion was paying for transportation infrastructure through our taxes. Not including taxes means ignoring straightforward methods that have successfully funded highways for decades. Perhaps the conference organizers were aware of the value of using taxes, but knew that the anti-tax movement has made taxes appear so toxic that they are on par with Lord Voldemort aka He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The conveners may be correct in that concern. Indeed, we appear to be facing a repeat of the Know-Nothing Party of the mid-19th century, with its anti-tax, anti-immigrant positions. However, ignoring the benefits of taxes as a revenue source forces us into depending on the people who crashed the economy to fund our infrastructure. truth-out.org/news/item/26847-us-treasury-and-transportation-departments-hold-a-privatization-party
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 03:32:53 +0000
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