This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. In President Trump's infrastructure

plans, there's too much focus on big new federally managed spending and too little focus

on devolving control of assets to

states and private entities. Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the

Cato Institute, says the president should look at Canada and England for

workable plans for privatization.

Well, Donald Trump's address to Congress, he did touch on infrastructure.

He called for a quote national plan on infrastructure and he reiterated his

one trillion dollar pledge. Now what we don't need an infrastructure in reality is a national plan.

The vast majority of government infrastructure in the United States is owned by state and local

governments.

They own it, they should be responsible for it.

And there's lots of negatives if the federal government has a big grand plan and starts telling

the states what to do.

What do those grand plans tend to look like?

Well, the problem is that, you know, the federal government comes in and they give aid to the state and local governments

for infrastructure, so we give about 45 billion a year to the states for

highways and another 15 billion or so a year for urban transit systems.

The problem is that spending comes with top down regulations.

So we impose so-called Davis-Bacon rules or labor requirements on the states that receive federal

money for highways.

It essentially requires... states that receive federal money for highways.

...