As a general organizing principle, if Nancy Pelosi is for something, it’s probably a bad idea. What, you ask, could be wrong with chocolate ice cream? And yet, when one learns that the House minority leader has a scoop on a sugar cone every morning for breakfast, the stuff immediately goes from delicious to suspicious.
Just about the worst thing, then, that can be said about President-elect Donald Trump’s infrastructure-building agenda is that Pelosi is all for it. Infrastructure spending is “an important priority for us,” Pelosi said the day after the election, telling her Democratic House colleagues “we should work together” with Republicans “to pass a bill very fast.”
Trump’s platform called for transforming “America’s crumbling infrastructure into a golden opportunity for accelerated economic growth and more rapid productivity gains.” That may all be imminently doable and eminently sensible. But there is always the nagging risk that spending on infrastructure, instead of promoting economic growth, degenerates into boondoggles—boat-anchors dragging on the economy. The stimulus, anyone? Anyone?
Some infrastructure projects are no-brainers. To get the Keystone XL pipeline under construction, the federal government doesn’t need to offer money, just regulatory approval. Trump promised, from the early days of his campaign, that if elected president, he would sign off on the pipeline right away.
Maintenance isn’t hard to justify either. Money spent repairing and refurbishing existing roads and bridges may not offer ribbon-cutting opportunities, but it costs less than building new roads, and without all the delays that come from securing rights-of-way and getting the dreaded environmental impact studies that can be expected from new projects. Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser is generally skeptical of the boffo claims made about how infrastructure investments pay off, but he cites approvingly a 1988 Congressional Budget Office study finding that “spending to maintain current highways in good shape produces returns of 30 percent to 40 percent.”
If some infrastructure ideas are easy to embrace, there are others to which the only reasonable reaction is to run away screaming. Let us please have no more said about that perennial white elephant, high-speed rail, those bullet-trains so beloved of Euro-yearning progressives and guaranteed to bleed billions of dollars away from useful infrastructure.
A tougher call are new public projects that appear to be worthwhile but have to be paid for somehow. Trump’s platform promises “a deficit-neutral plan targeting substantial new infrastructure investments.” To keep all the proposed new spending from adding to the deficit, candidate Trump proposed leveraging private investments with the promise of federal tax credits. Some pro-market economists, such as George Mason University’s Alex Tabarrok, are all in favor of this sort of “public-private partnership.”
But is such investment worth the tax breaks and forgone revenues? It depends on how much impact one thinks infrastructure spending has. Economists differ dramatically in their estimates, depending on what they’re counting and how. Harvard’s Glaeser points out that many economists assessing infrastructure investments downplay “standard cost-benefit analysis in favor of broad macroeconomic surveys,” which make it easier to find elusive benefits to offset the costs. Or they adopt a broad definition of what sort of job is created by building infrastructure. For example, in the Brookings Institution report “Beyond Shovel-Ready: The Extent and Impact of U.S. Infrastructure Jobs,” Joseph Kane and Robert Puentes claim that most “workers employed in infrastructure jobs tend to operate physical assets, rather than constructing or installing them.” In other words, if you are going to count the jobs produced by infrastructure, you have to include not just the crews building the road but all the truckers who move freight on it in the years to come. You might as well count, say, air traffic controllers as infrastructure jobs because they work at airports—which is just what the Brookings team does.
Trump might be happy to use that sort of accounting to boost the appearance of economic benefits from infrastructure construction, especially when it comes to airports. One of Trump’s most consistent promises has been to do something about the dingy, down-at-the-heels bus stations that pass for airports in America.
Yet if building new airports is a boon to the economy, then Spain’s economy should be booming. (It isn’t.) Before the crash, Spain was on a public and private airport-building bonanza, with such extravagant efforts as the Ciudad Real airport, which cost over a billion dollars. One could say there just wasn’t enough infrastructure spending—Spain never built the station and track to connect the airport to the region’s high-speed rail. This proved to be a problem as Ciudad Real is over a hundred miles from Madrid, the city it was supposedly going to serve. And it’s hardly the only “ghost airport” in the country. Albacete Airport limped along with an average of about four passengers a day in 2015. At least that beats Huesca-Pirineos Airport—built for $80 million—which saw only 242 passengers all of last year.
In other words, if we are going to spend money on airports, we should make sure that they will prove worth it. But worth it, how? Assuming we’re not talking about ghost airports, maybe the advantage to be gained by building new airports is more aesthetic than utilitarian. There was a telling comment that Trump made during a debate: that “our airports are like from a Third World country.” This isn’t so much a dig at the functionality of the New York-area airports Trump often singled out as it is a complaint that they are shabby and run-down. Whatever happened to the gee-whiz of flight? Back when the jet age was new and shiny airports were gleaming emblems of confidence in the future, JFK was distinguished by Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center (the swooping futurist structure now no longer a terminal but on its way to becoming a retro-chic hotel). The populuxe flying saucer that made LAX look like Tomorrowland is now Yesterdayville. Trump isn’t wrong to bemoan modern American airports as utilitarian and glamour-starved—in a Trumpian word, sad.
Nearly 20 years ago, David Brooks decried in The Weekly Standard the unwillingness of conservatives to embrace an agenda of national greatness. The article called for “restoring American greatness,” and the elements of greatness Brooks identified resonate at least in part with the sort of greatness Trump has in mind. Brooks had as his touchstone the original Library of Congress, now known as the Jefferson Building. The officials behind it “saw the building as a statement of American greatness,” Brooks argued, “and as a way to elevate America to greatness.”
It may seem silly to compare airports to libraries as opportunities for aspirational architecture. But in the digital age, libraries aren’t quite the civic centers they once were. One of the ways a city is known is by the look of the place one arrives. The docks may not have been fancy, but oceangoing passengers sailing into New York were greeted by the lady in the harbor. Grand Central Terminal is still a grand introduction to the city. And the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station wasn’t just a crime against architecture; it diminished New York City by destroying its most eye-popping gateway. So too airports are important public spaces that tell travelers a lot about the city, and country, in which they’ve landed. A beautifully designed and built airport declares to passengers that they have arrived.
The biggest challenge to this sort of greatness is what passes for great architecture these days. Trump’s tastes are as well known as they are incoherent—on the outside, glass boxes of the Mies knock-off school; on the inside, gold-plated bathroom fixtures and ersatz Louis Quatorze furniture. But the president-elect’s aesthetics are positively benign compared with the high-concept follies favored by public building and monument poobahs. Andrew Ferguson has chronicled in these pages Frank Gehry’s laughable (and pricey) designs for an Eisenhower Memorial. That sorry saga demonstrates just what suckers politicians and commissions and councils are for starchitects’ merry pranks. Piles of giant aluminum Fritos (Gehry’s default idiom) are not a statement of American greatness.
Thus the outline of what could be a successful, if distinctively Trumpian, infrastructure agenda: (1) Let the pipeline builders build; (2) rehab, restore, and resurface existing roads, bridges, and tunnels; and (3) build some grand airports that proclaim confidence and creativity. Oh, and (4) be sure to file the Gehry submissions away with the high-speed rail plans.
Eric Felten is managing editor of The Weekly Standard and host of the “Weekly Standard Confab” podcast.
