However, I don’t know where the demand is going to come from because the benefits to the people are nonmonetary. In other words, you can have really efficient airports and trade ports and railroads, but if no one has any money to buy products that get shipped to the United States, put on trucks and trains, and delivered to stores even really efficiently, then no one’s going to buy those products. That means the consumer economy stops, and that’s the largest part of the GDP equation. The math simply doesn’t add up to 5-6% or even half that.
I want to point out, however, that we will benefit pretty nicely in other nonmonetary ways, though. We’ll have smoother roads, better commutes along rail and subway lines, fewer maintenance issues on our cars, and safer streets for our kids. We’ll also have way more constructions vehicles erasing that smooth ride and shorter commute, but in the long run, that’ll be worth it, as long as private enterprise doesn’t cut corners and make other mistakes regulations and oversights were put in place to prevent. We obviously can’t trust them to do the right thing, but we’ll still have some pretty nice bridges and other structures, which does lift national pride.
The major issue is that Trump claims the economy is going to improve but the costs are going to kicked down to the consumers who generate GDP. Therefore, this plan will not revitalize the economy or do anything else Trump says it’s going to do. Wherever these improvements take place, the federal government will kick the costs down to the state level, and the states will pass it along to us, which takes away the ability for some of us to even afford using the improvements. Most people can’t afford to improve our infrastructure and still have money left over for tolls, higher airline prices, or even a car to get to work.
It looks like we could see structures rising up all around us that we can’t even afford to use but have to pay for anyway.
The money has to come from somewhere, which means he’ll be chipping away at that 5-6% until he arrives at what most economists believe won’t even be 3%, assuming nothing else goes wrong, like a major decline in the stock market because he’s allowing investment banks to start taking excessive risk again or like people being too sick to be productive at work or even go to work at all because they have no healthcare. I’m betting on 2.5%.
So what can we do?