Creating one or more infrastructure banks is a vintage Democratic Leadership Council recommendation. [View all]

[merrily]

In one of his addresses to Congress--possibly the special address--Obama mentioned a national infrastructure bank, as does Hillary Clinton's plan for her administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Infrastructure_Reinvestment_Bank For me, this raises some questions, especially given that the DLC touted this idea in one iteration or another and--full disclosure--I am not a fan of DLC policies.

I first heard of the Democratic Leadership Council right after Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel Chief of Staff. This was before Al From decided to implode the DLC qua entity and donate its papers to the Clinton Presidential Library, for safekeeping While not entirely easy to search, the DLC website then was easier to search than it became after the announcement that the DLC would dissolve its corporate existence. And, now, of course, the website is gone. Of course, the teachings of the DLC survived both technical corporate dissolution of the DLC and termination of the DLC website and remain highly relevant to the behaviors of the DNC and New Democrats.

In any event, quite a few of the earlier DLC articles were about schools and then about schools as infrastructure. As a general observation, things that involve children seem to be the wedge for policies from school lunch subsidies to charter schools: Who can say "no" to private ownership of schools subsidized at taxpayer expense, if Democrats and Republicans agree that charter schools definitely shall improve education of America's beloved children?

In any event, over time, DLC articles about schools as infrastructure in need of repair, etc. segued into funding of all kinds of infrastructure repairs through creation of infrastructure banks. Ultimately, former Congressman Harold Ford, who I believe was the last chair of the DLC, wrote an article about using infrastructure banks to repair and maintain the nation's infrastructure, such as roads and bridges and.....nuclear power plants.

I strongly suspect that Ford was able to distinguish in his own mind between (1) building or repairing a nuclear power plant; and (2) repairing a bridge or a road that the government built, owned and operated. However, his article gave no indication of any difference: it simply lumped nuclear power plants in with things like schools, bridges and roads. As I recall, his article made no distinction between charter schools and public schools, either. Therefore, I have no clue whether he intended to treat the building and/or repair of charter schools the same as public schools, bridges, etc. ("Which of these things is not like the others" is an important question to be able to answer on Main Street, as well as on Sesame Street.)

As the saying goes, the devil is always in the details. Accordingly, I recommend paying very close attention to the specifics of any proposal involving infrastructure banks.