http://www.epi.org/blog/trumps-infrastructure-plan-is-not-a-simple-public-private-partnership-plan-and-wont-lead-to-much-new-investment/
-- via my feedly newsfeed
President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that one of his first priorities will be a plan to boost infrastructure investment. Normally, this would be welcome news for those of us who have been arguing for years that increased public investment—including but not limited to infrastructure investments—should be a top-tier economic priority. Further, it also seems like a rare opportunity for bipartisanship—after all, Hillary Clinton made infrastructure investment a priority of her campaign's policy platform, as well.
The still-sketchy details of Trump's plan, however, are a cause for concern. What we know is that the plan is to provide a tax credit equal to 82 percent of the equity amount that investors commit to financing infrastructure. In the coming days, this will invariably be described as creating public-private partnerships (P3s). P3s are a standard model for financing infrastructure that can in theory be used with little downside compared to direct public provision. However, this description of the Trump plan is both not that comforting and incorrect. It's not comforting because the real-world record of P3s is much spottierthan textbook models would suggest. And it's not accurate because Trump's plan isn't as simple as encouraging new P3s. It is instead (at least in its embryonic form), simply a way to transfer money to developers with no guarantee at all that net new investments are made.
Let's start with describing what a textbook P3 would look like and what the rationale for using it would be. P3s are long-term contracts between the state and private companies to build and maintain infrastructure. They can be thought of as sitting somewhere between standard public provision and full privatization of infrastructure. Say that a state or local government wants to build a new road, but is constrained for some reason (usually simpleminded anti-tax politics) from raising the money to publicly finance it. It's important the democratically-elected and accountable government ensure the project is in the public interest. Having done this, the government can then negotiate with private financiers and developers to get the project built. To reduce costs and provide incentives for development, tax breaks are sometimes provided to holders of bonds issued by the private entities, and the private entities also receive a revenue stream of some kind in exchange for their investment. Often this is an explicit user fee, like a toll for using a road.
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