White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Battle for America Is the Battle for Science

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The man who popularized Greek-style yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya, is probably one of the only, if not the only, billionaire of recent years who does not owe his fortune to the government. Jeff Bezos does, Bill Gates does, Mark Zuckerberg does, along with dozens of others who have amassed fortunes in the digital age.

They are smart men all who have exploited opportunities, which would not have existed but for the government’s presence in science. I applaud individuals who build on government discoveries to make their fortunes.

But government-backed science, which has brought us everything from GPS to the internet, is in for a radical reversal, as laid out in the Trump administration’s budget proposal.

It was greeted with derision when it was released, with many hoping Congress will reverse it. However in the science community, in the halls of the National Science Foundation, in the facilities of the National Institutes of Health, and in the sprawling world of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, there is fear and alarm.

There should be. There should be from the world of learning a great bellow of rage, too.

The Trump administration has declared essentially that the United States cannot afford to be wise, cannot afford to invent, cannot afford to cure or to minister, and cannot afford to continue the rate of scientific evolution, which has made science of the post-World War II period so thrilling, benefiting countless people.

The administration has identified 62 programs for elimination or severe cutbacks. It has done this in a mixture of ignorance, indifference and delusion. The ignorance is that it does not seem to know how we got where we are; the indifference is part of a broad, anti-intellectual tilt on the political right; and the delusion is the hapless belief that science and engineering’s forward leap of 75 years will be carried on in the private sector.

The broad antipathy to science, to learning in all but the most general sense, is the mark of the Trump budget proposal.

But science, whether it is coming from ARPA-E, (Advanced Projects Research Research Agency-Energy) or the National Science Foundation’s watering of the tender shoots of invention, the Department of Energy’s world-leading contribution to the Human Genome Project, or the National Institutes of Health’s endless war against disease (especially the small and awful diseases like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and the rarest cancers) is the future. Without it, the nation is gobbling its seed corn.

In the Trump administration, there is money to build a giant wall but no money to surge forward into the future.

To the administration, as indicated in its budget proposal, the sciences and the engineering that flows from them is a luxury. It is not. It is the raw materials of peace and strength in this century and beyond.

To take just one of the follies implicit in the philistine budget, cutting funding for medical research will come just when there is need for more — research that if not funded by the government will not be done. New epidemics like bird flu, Zika and Ebola cry out for research.

Increasingly, the old paradigm that new drugs would come from the drug companies is broken. It now costs a drug company close to $2 billion to bring a new compound to market. That cost is reflected in new drug prices, as the companies struggle to recoup their investments before their drugs go off patent. Shareholder value does not encourage the taking of chances, but rather the buying up of the competition. And that is happening in the industry.

The world desperately needs a new generation of antibiotics. The drug companies are not developing them, and the bugs are mutating happily, developing resistance to the drugs that have held bacterial disease at bay since penicillin led the way 89 years ago.

Fighting the political folly that threatens science is the battle for America. In 50 years, without amply government-funded research and development, will we still be the incubator for invention, the shock troops against disease, the progenitors of a time of global abundance?

Our place in the world is not determined by our ideology, but by our invention. Sadly, the pace of invention is at stake, attacked by a particularly virulent and aberrant strain of governmental thinking.­­

Good Reason to Look at Health Care Anew

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Nothing is ever done until everyone is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else. — F.M. Cornford

There are no simple solutions to complex problems — unless they’ve become so complex that only a simple solution will do. Welcome to health care and insurance in all of their complexity.

Engineers like to say that if a new machine of structure has too many parts, it’s not ready. Not a bad idea to keep in mind when creating a societal structure like health care. One should know where one wants to go; knowing what one doesn’t want isn’t a starting point.

I submit that the goal of health policy, stripped of its advocates, denigrators and rentiers, should be to get everyone insured for the minimum amount of money and best care result. Simple, eh?

Some aspects:

  • There ought to be enough money for the United States to have universal health care, not a patchwork — a crazy quilt with holes and weak seams. We spend 19 percent of our GDP on health care, but Germany and the Netherlands spend just under 12 percent of theirs on hybrid public/private, comprehensive systems.
  • Insurance is a probability game, ergo it’s not unreasonable to ask the able-bodied to pay for the sick.
  • Mandates are not alien to us. We are mandated to pay taxes, drive with licenses and even wear clothes.
  • The more people covered by insurance, the lower the cost to all.
  • There seems to be no good explanation in the public record as to why medicine is so expensive in the United States — so much more expensive than elsewhere on earth, under wildly different systems.
  • The United States is the only country that leans on employers to provide health insurance to employees and to administer the policy and deal with issues that arrive with disputes.
  • The cost of the service patients receive is opaque once a third-party payer is responsible: the insurer. The basis of a hospital charge is hidden from the patients and policymakers. The patient has little idea what a procedure costs and who benefits from the expenditure, including doctors who own imaging companies, testing labs and even operating theaters. At the time of delivery, as Norman Macrae noted in The Economist years ago, neither the doctor nor the patients has an interest in the cost.
  • Hospitals are burdened with emergency rooms that can’t refuse the uninsured and hide this cost by overcharging elsewhere.

For more than 30 years I operated a publishing business and provided health care for my employees. It cost. It cost in time. It cost in premiums. It cost in employee well-being because as the premiums (well before Obamacare) rose by 15 percent to 25 percent, I was forced to shop for providers — which meant, in many cases, new doctors for my employees every year.

After salaries, health care was the big expenditure. I thought I was in the publishing business, but I was also, reluctantly, in the health care business.

I was keen that people have the security that goes with not having to be frightened of getting sick or falling off a bicycle. Some of my employees were on a spouse’s policy as well as mine and didn’t tell me. One man, a printer, said he didn’t like to fill in forms, so he, his wife and three children just told the hospital emergency room that the family had no money. He wanted me to give him what I was paying the insurer so he could spend it.

None of the proposals now before Congress, nor those codified in Obamacare, address the fact that as a nation we backed into health care and created complex set of stakeholders — some of whom should leave the field.

For someone who has wrestled with health care as a provider, as in other things, I believe that if the purpose is not defined, you’ll get the wrong result no matter how hard you try.

The big questions Congress should be asking of the House Republican health care plan, backed by President Donald Trump, are: Will it save money? Will everyone be covered adequately? From my point of view, Congress is proposing to replace a monster with a monstrosity.

That’s no prescription for a healthy nation, free from fear of accident or illness. Time to grab a clean sheet of paper and start again, maybe check on what works around the world, if that isn’t too damaging to our self-esteem.

For InsideSources

St. Patrick’s Day and the Delicate Matter of Irish Immigration

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St. Patrick’s Day is hard upon us. The green dye is being added to the beer in bars across the land, while more than 40 million Americans will remember their linkage to the Old Sod, even if that is sometimes tenuous.

Aye, it’s time for a wearing of the green and we will do it on March 17, in the great celebration of a small Irish nation and its relatively obscure patron saint.

On St. Paddy’s Day, we are all Irish whether we are, in fact, African-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American or any other hyphenated American. We all watch the parades, maybe take a drink or two and wear some green, from a hair ribbon to a whole suit.

If Britain has a special relationship with the United States, then Ireland has an extra-special relationship.

As has become a modern tradition, the taoiseach — as the prime minister of Ireland is called — will visit the White House and lobby President Donald Trump.

The prime minister, Enda Kenny, heads Fine Gael, which is more conservative than Ireland’s other two parties. Kenny will, one supposes, present the customary bowl of shamrock and talk of the long history of Ireland and the United States. Ireland has always looked to the United States as kind of safety valve — a place where Irish immigrants could find safety and hope, particularly during and after the Potato Famine of 1845-49.

Kenny also will have a purpose: lobbying Trump on behalf of the 50,000 Irish who are in the United States illegally — “illegal aliens” in the lexicon of the administration.

But the Irish PM will eschew that term in favor of “undocumented immigrants.” He will want to invoke that long history of migration from Ireland to America. He might even point out that the “wearing of the green” was illegal during the Irish Rebellion against the British in 1798.

The language is as loaded in Ireland as it is here. The Irish like to refer to their paperless migrants to the United States as “undocumented” — suggesting a slight matter of language, rather than an implicit indictment of “illegal.”

By contrast, and several Irish commentators have pointed out, workers in Ireland who do not have papers to work or live are referred to by Irish politicians as “illegal aliens.”

The Irish intelligentsia and many Irish analysts say this is racist. That the unspoken message Kenny will convey to Trump is: Take it easy on the Irish undocumented, they are white and Christian. Not brown or Muslim. We are you.

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole rages against what he sees as the race preference, and points out that the Trump administration is loaded with those of Irish descent. O’Toole calls them the “enablers” of Trump’s immigration policy: They are advisers Steven Bannon and Kellyanne (nee Fitzgerald) Conway, press secretary Sean Spicer and homeland security secretary John Kelly — as was short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Another Irish journalist, Cillian Donnelly, makes the same points and fears that Kenny, who has said his mission is to speak up for the undocumented Irish in America, will become complicit in the Trump immigration stand and the deportation of “brown” migrants.

Trump himself has links to Ireland. He owns a huge golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, on County Clare’s Atlantic coast.

Ironically, there he is enmeshed in a dispute over building a seawall. It seems when it comes to Ireland, Trump believes in global warming and sea rise: He has tried to get permission to build a 1.7-mile-long wall to keep severe storms from flooding his resort.

Trump’s request to build the original masonry wall were turned down, and he is pushing for two more limited rock and steel structures. Environmentalists are opposing them, too. They maintain that these structures will not end the erosion, but rather will increase it with time, destroying the dunes. However, Trump is the largest local employer and his wall is supported locally.

If all this is enough to drive you to drink, St. Patrick’s Day is a good time to start. Slainte!

Some Flaws in Trump’s Assumptions

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Trainee pilots, during that phase of training known as pilotage, are taught to navigate by ground reference. The danger is the students will assume things: The river, the golf course or any other landmark they see may not be the one near the destination. Assumptions are dangerous. My flight instructor warned me years ago, “Assumptions will kill you.”

But assumptions control everything, from the expectation your car will start in the morning to the belief this or that party will govern better.

In their turn, political leaders are governed by their own world of assumptions; assumptions which morph into beliefs and which, in turn, become in their proprietors’ minds facts and, in turn, policies.

Here are six of the motivating assumptions that underlie the presidency of Donald Trump to this point. They are flawed in different ways.

First: There is a huge unemployment problem. There isn’t. There is a shortage of workers which is beginning to affect productivity in everything, from new home building to new infrastructure construction.

If Trump is able to find a lot of new money for new infrastructure building and refurbishment, this skilled labor shortage will get worse. If you are a carpenter, crane operator, dump truck driver, electrician, plumber or welder, there is work aplenty. Just ask the electric utility industry or those building pipelines. The “help wanted” signs are out.

One caveat: The absolutely unskilled are close to being absolutely unemployable.

Second: The infrastructure is in deplorable shape and needs immediate attention. Here, the president is right. The question is, how will he fix it? In short, who will pay?

While the relevant committees of Congress have worked on the problem for years, they have been stymied by the lack of discretionary money in the budget. Every year, the highway bill makes it through with less money than its sponsors know it needs. Ditto state spending. 

Public-private funding, part of the presidential mantra, is tricky and only applies in certain circumstances where, eventually, the private investor can get the money out and make a profit. There is no magic formula. Sorry.

Third: Illegal immigrants are prone to committing crime. The evidence is not there, and study after study shows the opposite. This belief erroneously feeds the widespread animus against immigrants, legal and illegal.

Fourth: The economy is a “disaster.” It isn’t and it wasn’t when the president was elected. There is growth, but it is modest.

Fifth: The United States can unilaterally banish radical Islam the from the face of the earth. Religions and their extremes are, at best, contained not vanquished. Time and fatigue will put the evil genie back in the bottle, not American might.

Religions love martyrs – and Islam more so than most. Martyrdom is the sustaining force of today’s Islamic terrorism. Minting more martyrs will be counterproductive.

Sixth: Regulation has the U.S. trussed up and bound: a great giant cannot get up and produce goods and services and well-being for the people. Trump says that regulations should be reduced by two-thirds. But our regulatory burden is not as heavy as, say, that in Europe, and regulations do protect the public health and safety. That is why they were enacted in the first place.

Corporations complain too much, although some regulations may be onerous. I have personally experienced the good and the bad. Two examples: when I was publishing magazines and I wanted them displayed on the streets of New York City, I had to offer the same incentives to 95,000 other newsstands, where I had no readers. On the other hand, disposing of solvent used in a small printing plant was bothersome and slightly expensive but necessary. Without the EPA goad, the solvent would go into the sewers, with cumulative bad environmental and public health effects.

Bad assumptions make bad policy. Bad assumptions mostly come from hearsay and it would seem the president hears things from his friends: the time-honored New York City practice of schmoozing. It is a great tradition, but can lead to dubious assumptions, ergo beliefs and policies.

Mass Deportations — the Surfacing of the Worst in Us

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The accelerated deportation of illegal immigrants is brainless, cruel, antagonizing to many allies and neighbors and, ultimately, banal. It is antithetical to our better natures and to the humane face of America that has made us an exemplar for human rights, a voice for the voiceless and, as Ronald Reagan said, “a shining city on a hill.”

It is American exceptionalism abandoned for petty prejudice.

There is linkage — there always is linkage — between the desecration of the Jewish Chesed Emeth Cemetery in University City, Mo., and those knocks on the door as the men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) perpetrate the obscenity, ordered up by those in authority. Prejudice has been affirmed by government.

No country in this disturbed world can allow unfettered immigration, but to turn on those who have crossed the border for the simplest human reason — need — with the full force of the state and to send them to a place where they fled for a better life, for a dream — the American Dream — is to implement a crime against humanity.

Hate is easily inflamed. The darkest passion of human beings is to love to hate, to blame all of life’s ills on others and to seek to punish them for just being. It is what produced the sectarian violence in Ireland, perpetuated apartheid in South Africa, and caused the great horrors of the last century, including the Armenian massacre in Turkey and the Holocaust. Not only do people love to hate but hate becomes hereditary, handed down through the generations.

The United States has struggled against its incipient hates and even appeared, with the election of Barack Obama, to be able to put them aside. But we have come through a political season where hate has been dog whistled and it has come running.

If you think what you have just read is far-fetched, let me tell you that every time I write about immigration and the plight of the dispossessed, I am deluged with virulent, hate-filled emails. Once this evil genie is loose, no prejudice is out of possibility.

All my emails repeat this political phrase out of last year’s campaign, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” How many things that were illegal in my lifetime are now legal? Try segregated lunch counters and homosexuality, for starters. The goal posts move.

You can build a single act of illegality — in this case crossing a border to get a better life — into a crime of giant proportions without statute of limitations: a mark of Cain, an indelible stain. But it is not. The hard-pressed father and mother, breaking the law by working without papers, and yet holding it all together so that the children might have it easier, is the face of these criminals. Lives in extremis.

Study after study has shown that they are less likely to commit violent crimes or to disturb the peace than Americans whose ancestors arrived on these shores as immigrants in another time.

To break up families, to send people to countries where they are de facto foreigners with no means of supporting themselves and where they will encounter hostility and danger, in the name of legality, is preposterous. It is something that will pass into history as a time when our country — America the Great — did something totally unworthy of its better nature.

When the state moves people by the millions for its own purposes, terrible injustice and human suffering result.

We did that: We have the mark of slavery in our DNA. In small measure we expiated that, until this dark time. Shame!

For InsideSources

The Horror When the Men from ICE Come Knocking

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I wonder daily, really, what life is like on the other side of the windowpane that separates the legal resident from the illegal.

I wonder if the skinny, young Chinese woman working in the restaurant is legal. I have noticed her because she works so hard: She is there when it opens and when it closes.

The restaurant is family owned, so I wonder if she is there legally — a link in “chain migration” — or illegally, in a kind of servitude. The chain is forged when a legal family sponsors other family members, who can then come here preferentially, welcome and free.

If she came here otherwise, say on a tourist or student visa, and did not return to her home country, then she is in danger of a knock on the door, handcuffs and the horror of deportation. And if she is arrested for a crime, no matter what, she is closer to the door.

I also wonder about the Mexican family that detailed my old car so well in the July heat. Cash work without a paper trail tells part of their story. Did they walk across the border from Mexico together or separately? The women speak English, but not the men. Were they a family before or after coming here? Are some of them here legally; will children lose their fathers, wives their husbands, if there are deportations?

Meeting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), wearing black windcheaters with “POLICE” on top of “ICE” emblazoned in white on the backs, must be a heart-stopping experience. These are federal enforcement agents, police, not paper-pushers. This is rough stuff, not community policing.

I listen to tales of deportations: families torn apart, and people sent to countries where they were born but had never resided. I wonder if these people are yearning for U.S. citizenship and the ability to vote. Mostly, I think they are yearning just to live here in peace, free from the fear of a knock on the door from ICE agents.

Mark Jason, a friend who lives in Malibu, Calif., has devised a way to deal with illegal immigrants that eschews the brutality of deportations and the emotional hostility that amnesty for them provokes in some Americans. He calls it the “Third Way” and for six years, he has been promoting it with his own money.

Like many good ideas, Jason’s plan is very simple: He wants to create a 10-year, renewable “Special Work Permit” with an additional dimension: holders need to earn the permit by complying with our laws and paying a 5-percent tax on their wages, and their employers will also pay a 5-percent tax.

Taxes collected from these permits would amount to $167 billion in 10 years, according to Jason’s think tank, the Immigrant Tax Group. “Payments could be facilitated by cell phone and computer technology, and the immigrants gain their freedom with certain rights and can assimilate more easily,” Jason said.

“These payments would be used to provide hospitals, schools, policing and prisons in the local communities where the immigrants live. This third way is a win-win that can be implemented simply,” said Jason, who is a retired budget analyst for California’s university system and a former IRS agent.

If I am right about the status of the young Chinese woman and the Mexican family, they could all live the American dream, working without the fear of a knock on the door: the knell that sounds for all who live in fear of the state and its agents, who have terrified down through the centuries.

Argonne National Laboratory Diary

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By Linda Gasparello

Where Scientists Sleep

Last week my husband, Llewellyn King, and I abandoned the delights of West Warwick, R.I., to visit Chicago – actually, a part of Chicagoland that few visitors get to see.

Llewellyn was a speaker at a conference held at Argonne National Laboratory, just outside of Chicago. Argonne is the multidisciplinary science and engineering research center, born out of the University of Chicago’s work on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.

The lab, which occupies 1,500 acres, came as a total surprise for our Uber driver, a Chicago native who used to drive trucks professionally. “I’ve driven past this place many times, but I never knew what was goin’ on,” he said.

We had some difficulty finding Argonne’s Main North Gate and delay getting our ore-arranged passes. Once cleared for entry, we had to drive behind a security vehicle to our hotel: the Argonne Guest House, which is Building 240 on the “campus.” It is where most people stay for conferences, short research visits and invited tours of the site, thus avoiding the main security gate rigamarole.

Our driver thought all this cloak-and-dagger stuff was a hoot, but Llewellyn, who has visited Argonne many times, wasn’t entertained. He wanted his dinner and a glass, or two, of red wine.

The guest house is a fine example of 1970s university dormitory architecture, more Brutalist than humanist. But what the building lacks in design, it more than makes up for in setting: It backs onto some of the Argonne site’s wooded acres.

The lobby and the guest rooms don’t inspire one to linger. But you might want to hang out with colleagues in the elevator lobby on any of the guest floors. Each has comfortable club chairs, equipped with wooden swivel trays and a huge whiteboard hanging on a wall – perfect for a pre-breakfast solving of isotope burn-up equations.

Zen at Work

The Zen garden in the seven-story Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

As you drive up to the Theory and Computing Sciences Center on the Argonne site, your heart will beat a little faster: This building – Building 240 — with its jutting, pierced concrete slabs and glass walls, houses state-of-the-art supercomputing systems. You sense from its great, gray exterior that the interior won’t be filled with floors of sensory-deprivation cubbies for techies.

It isn’t. The building, according to the lab, “was designed to be an open and flexible workspace to encourage the free flow of ideas between scientists at Argonne as well as the technology to connect researchers across the globe.” Its seven stories wrap around a Zen garden.

There are cloth-lined cubicles with whiteboards — on some of which I saw scrawled equations. But on the ground floor no glass walls separate them from the garden. Surely, gazing at the garden and ambling around it through the open hall must reduce workers’ stress; unless you’re a worker who is stressed by the thought of a snake curled up in your cubicle.

The garden’s raked, gray gravel sits upon dirt and occasionally critters – frogs, rodents and even garden-variety snakes — break through the garden’s surface and can be found among its plants and rocks.

“We like ’em. They’re engineers,” one ground-floor worker told me.

Behavioral Science

Door sign in the Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

“Scientists are literal.” That’s how Gilbert Brown, director of the nuclear engineering program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, explained why the Theory and Computing Sciences Center’s bathrooms are called “toilet rooms.”

“The rooms have toilets but no baths,” he said.

Makes sense to me.

When I pointed out to another nuclear engineer that all the push pins on a bulletin board outside the center’s conference room were placed in a rectangle, he said unhesitatingly, “Scientists are neat as pins.”

Doe, Oh, Dear

The white fallow deer herd that has roamed the Argonne site since the lab’s inception in 1946 – and has caused visitors sometimes to speculate on the nature of the experiment that produced their unusual coloring – has dwindled to one doe.

“Prior to 1946, part of the land that is now Argonne was the country estate of Gustav Freund, inventor of ‘skinless’ casings for hot dogs. Freund had a small herd of the deer on his estate for several years. The naturally light-colored species – Dama dama – are native to North Africa, Europe and parts of Asia.

“When the federal government purchased the property, it was believed all of the herd had either been given away to parks and zoos or destroyed by the local game warden. It turned out there still were two does on the property, and one gave birth to a buck. The herd created from these three deer became a fixture on the Argonne property and a topic of interest and conversation for employees and visitors alike,” Donna Jones Pelkie wrote in Argonne Today, a lab publication.

Unfortunately, the white fallow deer didn’t reproduce at a normal rate because of a lack of genetic diversity; even when they do reproduce, they only give birth to one fawn per year – unlike the fecund, native white-tailed deer which also roam the site. The fawns were prey to coyotes, which have become city slinkers.

Efforts to preserve or replenish this historic herd were stymied by state regulations, which not only would’ve required any new white fallow deer brought onto the site to be deemed “livestock,” but also would’ve made Argonne responsible for the herd’s maintenance, including penning, feeding and veterinary care.

So the lab opted for natural attrition, which comports with “its thinking of keeping natural areas in balance with the native ecosystem,” according to the Jones Pelkie story.

Infrastructure Needs Bring Comity to Congress

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By the current standards on Capitol Hill, there is astounding comity in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The committee, which held its first hearing of the new Congress recently, exhibits a kind of good humor, of give and take, which largely ceased with the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.

What makes this committee different is that Republicans and Democrats are staring into the jaws of hell together, so to speak. Disparate as they are, from super-liberal Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia to the committee’s conservative chairman, Bill Shuster, R-Pennsylvania, the members know that the nation’s infrastructure is in deplorable condition.

They know, too, that in the current Congress, with its GOP aversion to new taxes, there is not enough money to fix the deteriorating infrastructure. They know all too well the old saw about immovable objects and irresistible forces.

A panel of heavy infrastructure users, headed by business celebrity Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, laid out the choke points for his industry: air traffic control and the interstate highway systems.

One of Smith’s ideas for improving the nation’s highways, bridges and public transit systems is to raise the gasoline and diesel tax, which has languished since 1994. But he warned this might not be the whole answer when new forms of propulsion, like electricity and compressed natural gas are changing or threatening to change the transportation mix.

No one on the panel objected to the idea of taxes for infrastructure. The overriding concern was from committee members who wondered whether the money would be spent where it was planned or diverted to general revenue needs.

It interested me that it was Smith who recommended greater taxation. His panel colleagues, including Ludwig Willisch, CEO of BMW of North America, and David MacLennan, CEO of Cargill, did not demure. More important, Republican members of the committee swallowed the tax poison without visible physical effect. No retching, trembling or detectable palpitations.

The elephant in the room, of course, was the Trump administration. Candidate Trump promised a massive infrastructure leap forward.

No one seemed confident that spending hawks in the Congress would support such athletics. It is hard to be hopeful that President Trump will get all or any of the new money out of a Congress that is looking at escalating deficits.

Talking to people involved in infrastructure, one gets this picture: user fees are not enough and toll roads, favored in principle by many, do not raise enough money to attract and keep private investors. Philip White of the global law firm Dentons, points out that many of these have failed in Texas — ground zero for private enterprise — and have had to be taken over by government entities. Similar fates have befallen toll roads elsewhere.

The big initial boost for the infrastructure under Trump will not come from new money, but rather from authorizing previously delayed projects and easing regulations. There is also the current highway fund spending, which has risen somewhat.

But nobody, especially on the House committee, believes it is enough to reverse the relentless crumbling of roads and bridges. The real infrastructure funding need has been estimated to be as high as $6 trillion.

Back to FedEx’s Smith and what he thinks will work: a mileage tax, congestion pricing and high-access lanes on highways; a revised tax code, which would eliminate some of the anomalies that hamper strategic planning; privatizing air traffic control; and upgrading runways.

He pointed to Memphis, FedEx’s “SuperHub,” where there has been a huge gain in productivity with air traffic improvements financed by his company.

Cargill, for its part, sang the song of barges, shipping containers, trucks and railcars. “It is the interconnected nature of waterways, railways and highways — the three-legged stool of domestic transportation — that is important to keeping the United States competitive. When one mode of transportation is troubled, it affects the entire system,” MacLennan said.

All is not lost for infrastructure spending. Trump, it appears, is keen to say he has honored his campaign promises. And he promised big.

Get ready for taxes, fees and congestion charges. The need is great, the means slim and taxes, by another name, will come.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will need all of its evident camaraderie as it takes its shovel to the legislative tarmac.

For InsideSources

Trump Takes Washington in a Storm, but Why the Hurry?

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It is a good thing for politicians to honor their campaign promises. In that, President Donald Trump is acting in an exemplary way.

But does he have to do it so fast?

In a campaign ideas and ideology dominate, details languish. But once office is won, especially the highest office in the land, there is time to contemplate not just the journey but the best route.

There is a vast amount of know-how and knowledge to be tapped that might, on consideration, temper the ideas of the campaign.

For example, the president, before commanding the hiring of 5,000 more U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, might have learned how difficult it is to recruit and train these men and women. He might have taken note that there are 1,200 vacancies along the border right now, despite strenuous recruiting efforts.

His early action in pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a trade deal that was negotiated between 12 Asia-Pacific nations who represent more than 40 percent of the global economy — was done in haste, which might set world history off in a direction that the nation and the world will rue.

One of Trump’s campaign promises, if not the theme of his campaign, was that the United States would be led by the world’s best negotiator, its top dealmaker. Why would he tear up a deal before he had taken time to improve it? There is no art in trashing a deal.

Why would he willingly relinquish a leadership role in global trade to China, which he has called out time and again?

On the face of it, Trump will now have to direct the U.S. Trade Representative to negotiate separate deals with the TPP signatories, possibly taking years. China has proposed the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, stepping right in where the United States has stepped out. Does Trump want to be known as the president who lost Asia? History is cruel; its mistakes devastating.

Would Trump prefer 28 bilateral trade deals with Europe when he could have 27 plus one, Britain? Europe is our largest trading partner, a relationship worthy of tender loving care, but Trump has encouraged its breakup.

Trump loves to make a grand entrance. He showed that with his stately ride in the company of his wife, Melania, down an escalator in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City before announcing his candidacy on June 16, 2015. It was dramatic: the quintessential Trump, showman and grandstander.

His entrance into Washington has been louder and splashier — almost as though it is a finale, not an opening. The city is reeling, the world is agog and the Republicans — to say nothing of the president’s Cabinet nominees — are in the dark about his policies; where his head is at?

The president may not have had as many people at his inauguration as he had wished, but his actions have turned him into a show of shows. Even as the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus goes out of business, Donald Trump is its temporary replacement: The Greatest Show on Earth. But this big top stands for four years, and no performance lasts that long.

Entrances and showmanship are not statesmanship. Trump needs to begin to show that he can stay the course beyond a grand entrance; he needs to be seen to negotiate for the United States, not just to be the great treaty abrogator.

Trump made more than 650 promises on the campaign trail. Some he can keep, particularly when they have no more depth than reversing his predecessor’s executive actions.

Having failed to prove the theory that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, he seems determined to expunge as much of Obama’s legacy as he can get his hands on.

The big promises, like creating 25 million jobs, boosting the growth rate to between 4 percent and 5 percent and balancing the budget, may require the great dealmaker to do some deals with the country’s expectations.

Grand entrances can lead to ignoble exits.

The Left Should Stop Whining and Start Influencing Trump

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Through the nation and across the world the liberals, the centrists, the traditionalists and the orthodox are in shock: Donald J. Trump is America’s 45th president and they don’t like that one bit, or like him at all.

I have some advice for those who are beating their breasts and crying, “The sky is falling!”: Get over it, and get to work.

Trump is the man. Those who fear his changes ought to start using the man’s own tool: leverage.

According to The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who covered Trump’s presidential campaign, and interviewed him again last week, the president has no particular ideology. But he gets ideas from Steve Bannon, his senior counselor and chief White House strategist.

The forces opposed to Trump would do better to focus their fire on Bannon. Criticize him, even ridicule and revile him, but endeavor to get the message straight to Trump.

How can one direct invective at those around Trump, but speak to him directly?
The tool for reaching Trump is television.

Television is a medium associated with mass communication, but now it has a chance of being a medium of singular communication: the way to whisper in the president’s ear in plain sight.

Trump told Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” that he gets his information from “the shows like yours.” Trump’s early Cabinet appointments show the veracity of this: What he knows, how he thinks and how he’ll act is influenced by what he sees on television much more than by learned discourse in the press.

Trump tweets because what he has to say fits in the written equivalent of a sound bite.

Trump is a creature of television, and it’s a two-way street for him: He loves being on it and gets his information from it. That’s why he appoints people whom he has seen on television. He appointed Monica Crowley as senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, but she has relinquished the post amid a plagiarism scandal. Reportedly he was considering Laura Ingraham for White House press secretary. Both are television chirpers.

If you want money to build a new nuclear reactor, more funding for the National Institutes of Health to do research on a certain disease, or if you want to change the fortunes of a small country, take your message to television.

This means the political communications machine needs retooling.

You cannot persuade Trump with dense arguments in journals of opinion. Instead, you must persuade him with easily grasped ideas that will make their way onto television — especially onto the Sunday morning talk shows.

Fox has the edge with Trump, which makes the sale of some ideas more difficult. But he’s open to a catchy concept; something that he can rework into a slogan of his own, while his administration incorporates it into policy.

The other route to Trump are his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Liberals should stop whining about their having a role in the White House. Let them have it. It’s a good thing — and an excellent thing for these times.

Even though they’ve been shielded by wealth from many of the realities of life, they can’t be totally immune to what their generation thinks and says. They are in their middle 30s; Trump is 70. That’s important. It wouldn’t be so if they didn’t get a hearing from Trump. But he relies on them, uses them as sounding board. They could be of value in balancing what Trump hears from Bannon and national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Only a child can say to a parent, a parent who dotes on that child, “You’re full of it.”

That’s what everyone needs to hear sometimes, and Trump especially. Bring them on!