White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

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

How Computers Are Trashing the Old Ways of Work

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I saw the future outside my apartment building this week — and it was a brown van. To be exact, it was a United Parcel Service van and the operator was struggling with a huge load of parcels on a hand truck.
 
You can’t tell too much from a parcel, but the shape gives the contents away to some extent: a small, rolled carpet; a large, flat-screen television; about a dozen boxes that could contain a variety of goods — goodies for fun and essentials to keep things going. Talk about Frankie Laines’1949 hit “Mule Train.”
 
Every day the UPS delivery man is at our building, sometimes with more, sometimes with less. Sometimes he brings clothes for my wife, and recently he brought a book for me. What the trusty fellow in the brown van doesn’t unload, his compatriots from FedEx and the United States Postal Service do.
 
A sea of goods flow into this building each day; goods that have never seen a retail store, never been offered for sale in a mall or high street shop, but goods that people want anyway. Welcome to online shopping and the future disruption it'll bring.
 
What's missing with this shopping is the shop, whether it's a big box store in the mall or a ma-and-pa operation on the high street.
 
It's part of one of the great historical revolution brought about by the Internet. All the data show that online shopping grows every day.
 
Eventually, in the way that the malls undermined the neighborhood shop and the chains killed off those wonderful downtown department stores, a different one for each city (Garfinkel's in Washington, D.C., Jordan Marsh in Boston and I. Magnin in San Francisco), the Internet may bury the malls.
 
Make no mistake, the Internet is a hellishly efficient and cruel exterminator of jobs, as well as a ruthless agent of social change.
 
As so often, the political class is still convinced that job growth can be achieved by economic and regulatory policy shifts. It's easier to blame presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, depending on your ideological persuasion, even though the evidence of massive change is everywhere, than to face a new reality.
 
It's nigh impossible to speak to anyone on the phone at a bank, an insurance company or a utility without going through 20 minutes of computer-assisted torture in the form of voice prompts — “Press star 2 to get your balance.”
 
Academia has been surprisingly slow to study and quantify the job-threatening nature of the new order. MIT, Oxford and Harvard have spoken up, and now you can expect more pessimism from on high as academics get the wind up about their own employment.
 
In the ivory towers, those citadels of refined arrogance, there is deep disquiet. The cause: MOOCS, or massive open online courses. These are attracting students by the hundreds of thousands; some for credit, some just for the joy of watching the most articulate professors in action. They are creating a star system that favors the telegenic over everything else and could, in time, change the nature of higher education so profoundly that many lesser university will close up shop. One study, by researchers at Oxford, has estimated 47 percent of our jobs may disappear.
 
History tells us that new ways of doing things lead to new areas of endeavor; agrarian people became urban manufacturers, manual labor gave way to service-sector work. The computerization of work is an equal-opportunity un-employer. Is new work possible?
Factories in China and Germany are as subject to computer predation as those in the United States. We may yet see a global economic collapse driven by too much productivity; computer productivity.
 
This column was written on a computer and distributed by computer. The contents were generated by a human being, but that may change. Stay online. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate