Rather than spend words in this week’s column decrying the latest mismanagement by the clown show currently being run out of the big house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in our nation’s capital, I thought I’d actually talk about what America would look like, were Americans irresponsible enough to elect me president, and assuming I had a cooperative Congress.
The first thing I’d do would be to sign an absolutely massive infrastructure bill. Trump proposed $1 trillion for infrastructure in this week’s address to Congress; I think that is comically inadequate. I’d propose half a trillion dollars a year for 10 years. With that money I’d:
Build a nationwide, publicly-subsidized high-speed internet access system, so that every American household has affordable access to gigabit connection speeds. According to Wikipedia, “as of 2015, South Korea has the fastest average internet connection in the world at 26.7 Mbit/s, with a peak internet connection speed of 95.3 Mbit/s according to the report State of the Internet published by Akamai Technologies, which is nearly 40% faster than the next fastest country, Sweden, whose average internet speed is 19.1 Mbit/s. South Korea’s speed is almost five times faster than the world average of 5.6 Mbit/s and more than twice as fast as the United States at 12.6 Mbit/s. It is important to note that 100 Mbit/s services are the average standard in urban South Korean homes and the country is rapidly rolling out 1Gbit/s connections or 1,000 Mbit/s, at $20 per month, which is roughly 179 times as fast as the world average and 79 times as fast as the average speed in the United States.”
Why can’t we do that?
I’d also build a nationwide high-speed rail system. Having ridden on high-speed rail in other parts of the world, I can say that passenger rail in the United States is a national embarrassment.
Please don’t read this as in any way a criticism of Amtrak, by the way. It actually does a decent job of providing what we’ve asked it to provide – competent passenger service between major urban centers. I just think we should ask way more of it, and give it the resources to get it done.
Coast to coast, top to bottom, the system I envision would connect – at a minimum – the largest cities in every state in the lower 48. I’d set a time horizon of 5 years to build it out. We spent the 1950s and 1960s building out what was at the time the world’s most advanced and extensive highway system; it’s time we brought our passenger rail system into the 21st century.
I’d tackle every backlogged repair and upgrade in our current, crumbling infrastructure. There are a lot of civil engineers going around looking vaguely haunted because of the parlous state of thousands of highway bridges, water and sewer mains, water treatment plants, dam and flood control infrastructure, and so on.
In order to increase the bargaining power of working class people across the economy, I’d also repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act repealed some provisions of the earlier Wagner Act and allowed individual states to outlaw “closed shops,” which radically weakened the hand of organized labor in those states. I would do everything I could to get as many American workers as possible represented by labor unions, in every sector of the economy. This would go a fair distance in correcting the tendency of economic gains to go exclusively to the top of the income scale.
I’d also reform the Affordable Care Act to add in the “public option” which was torpedoed by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman when the original bill was passed back in 2010. According to Wikipedia, “The public health insurance option, also known as the public insurance option or the public option, is a proposal to create a government-run health insurance agency which would compete with other private health insurance companies within the United States. The public option is not the same as publicly funded health care, but was proposed as an alternative health insurance plan offered by the government.“
That particular option was a critical method of cost containment as the program was originally conceived, and the left end of the Democratic coalition badly wanted it, but Lieberman threatened to filibuster the bill if it was included.
Finally, I would make sure the United States had a robust industrial policy. I’ve mentioned before that Germany could be our model for this. They invest lots of public money in training a highly educated work force – and “education” doesn’t necessarily mean college. While the German higher education system is excellent, they also place a far greater emphasis on vocational training than the United States does. Most of the people who actually build BMW cars in Germany’s factories do not need a college education to do so, but they do need familiarity with precision, computerized machinery, plus deep and detailed training in various materials-handling skills, and so on.
That highly educated work force designs and makes high-end products for high wages, because education (again, in the broader sense — not just college) makes workers more valuable. It then exports those high-quality products at high prices.
Germany is the third biggest exporter in the world despite having slightly less than a third of America’s population and only about 7 percent of the largest exporter, China — while having some of the best-paid workers in the world. German auto workers, for example, make almost twice what America’s workers make.
All of that would make life tangibly better for American workers, particularly that portion of American workers that are living the typical, normative situation the 70 percent of workers that do not have college degrees.
In the real world, virtually everything I’ve proposed already exists in practically every other country in our weight class. Unfortunately, none of this is likely to happen while Democrats are almost as covered in Wall Street pocket lint as the Republicans.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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