President Donald Trump’s national infrastructure plan centers on glorified seed money directed to the localities looking to improve/build out their infrastructure.  The idea is that the locals know their needs best, those needs should be funded primarily locally or from within the nation’s private economic sector, and the building out will aggregate into a vastly improved national infrastructure—real bottom up development, with a little help from the Feds.

To that end, Trump is going to propose $200 billion in Federal spending be committed to a total $1 trillion infrastructure development collection of projects (OK, considerable help).

Right now the dynamic is: come, ask for a whole lot, bang on the table, have your economic studies showing the tens of thousands of jobs that will be created, have your regional study saying this will transform America, bang on the table some more, hire some lobbyists and you get money.  We’d rather have people come and say, “Listen, we’re chipping in this much, give us this little increment and we can make this thing happen.”

Naturally, the locals are getting their knickers twisted.  The ones with the biggest projects

say that local cost-sharing and private financing efforts would fall well short of making up for sharply reduced federal funding.

Nonsense.  You don’t get to freeload off Uncle Sugar, anymore.  Project leads in Chicago or Dallas don’t have a claim on the (tax) money of the good citizens of New York or California, and under the administration plan, they won’t be allowed to exercise their false claim to OPM.  New York and California will be able to keep their money for their own local projects.

This is an example of the deer in the headlights response of folks so used to the Government teat that they can’t conceive of better alternatives [emphasis added]:

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect the federal government to cover half the cost of the Gateway project, which also includes bridges and track improvements.

“There’s no people or economic activity in that region that could possibly cover the cost of that?” said the administration official, when asked about a recent appeal by Mr Cuomo for federal aid for the project. “I think that’s a tough sell, would be my response.”

The suggestion that New York and New Jersey could pay their own way on the project…shocked some of the tunnel’s advocates.

Prioritize, guys.  On what are you spending your citizens’ money that you think is more important than your Gateway?  Say that out loud, so your citizens—your constituents, your bosses—can hear you.

…or budget cuts and coercion, depending on your perspective.

The president’s budget, due for release Tuesday, will spare the two largest drivers of future spending—Medicare and Social Security—leaving trillions in cuts from other programs. That includes discretionary spending cuts to education, housing, environment programs, and foreign aid already laid out by the administration, in addition to new proposed reductions to nondiscretionary spending like food stamps, Medicaid, and federal employee-benefit programs.

What’s going to be ignored in the inevitable hoo-raw over these allegedly terrible cuts to various aspects of our nation’s “safety” net is the truly terrible downside of those aspects.

The Federal monies being sent to the States for education, housing, environment programs, food stamps, Medicaid, and on and on in the seemingly endless, yet growing, list is in large part those States’ own money.  Its income and other taxes collected from each State’s citizens and businesses (which is to say each State’s citizens), with a fraction of those collections then returned to each State (the rest is sent to other States, which does the collected-from State’s citizens no good at all), but with a cynically attached value-add: Federal strings.  Use this money the way we tell you to use it, or we’ll reduce the amount of your money we return to you.

With the proposed cuts to these programs, the States actually will be gaining: the cuts will facilitate associated tax rate cuts, leaving more money in those States—those States’ citizens’—hands.  Just as importantly, though, the strings attached to the Federal funds transfers will be greatly weakened in favor of the States’ own decision-making.

We’ll find out, too and in short order, how sincere the Republican-controlled Congress, whose members ran on and were elected to effect fiscal discipline, really are, whether they’re more interested in maintaining Federal control over States’ individual and varied economic decisions, or whether we need to just keep doing what we’ve been doing the last several Congressional election cycles: firing those who fail to perform, and replacing them.

Congressman Mark Sanford (R, SC) had such a thought:

For a budget to have any meaning, it’s essential we have realistic assumptions in terms of economic growth and in terms of spending reductions.

True enough.  It’s more essential, though, that our representatives not use such excuses to block meaningful tax reform and actual spending cuts and with that continue to exercise too much control over the 50 States.

As an aside, this brings up two elephants in the safety net herd: Social Security and Medicare.  The foregoing—all of it—applies to these two things, also.  In spades.