This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 29th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Trump talks about infrastructure the way many politicians do.

It's deficient, it's crumbling, and rebuilding it would drive economic growth in tremendous ways.

Ryan Bourne is author of the new Cato report,

would more government infrastructure spending boost the U.S. economy?

We spoke earlier this month.

So I guess describe the difference here between the fears associated with what Donald Trump was going to unveil as his big

federal infrastructure spending program and what we actually got.

Well I think many conservatives and libertarians were fearful that Trump was going to go for a huge

splurge in infrastructure spending.

He'd obviously touted this quite arbitrary figure of investing an extra trillion dollars over the next decade.

Now it wasn't at all clear at any stage how much of that would be federal funding.

But certainly in the Infrastructure Initiative he launched a couple of weeks ago, the figure of 200 billion

over a decade was used there, which was a lot lower than I think many people had initially

feared.

And on the good side, on the positive side, he seemed to be talking much more about the

supply side of the provision of infrastructure.

So he was emphasizing the need to speed up the permitting processes in terms of getting construction activity underway.

He was talking about streamlining environmental regulations.

He was saying that the federal government in many ways plays an unnecessary middleman and he wanted to see local and state governments

come up with their own solutions to infrastructure projects and he also talked about

...