in wake of democrat takeover of house, nancy pelosi sees increased infrastructure focus

Winning majority control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 2010, Democrats may be poised to challenge the Trump Administration’s agenda on a number of fronts.

But in one area, says California Representative Nancy Pelosi, House Democrats and the White House may find common ground: the need to fund infrastructure projects nationally.

Pelosi, who served as Speaker of the House from 2007 to 2011, has told reporters that in an immediate post-election phone conversation with President Trump, one of the issues discussed was “building infrastructure for America, and I hope that we can achieve that.”

Pelosi, who appears likely to be elected by members of the House as the next Speaker early next year, noted that although Trump emphasized infrastructure funding during his 2016 campaign, he “really didn’t come through with it in his first two years in office.”

But Pelosi also said that the subject of increased funding for road, bridge, airport, and port infrastructure has, to date, “not been a partisan issue in the Congress of the United States.”

Last month, Pelosi remarked that the new Congress could “create jobs by investing in new infrastructure projects like our water systems and broadband internet.”

In a column for the site MarketWatch, Steven Pressman, a Colorado State University economics professor, noted that while an earlier Trump proposal to fund up to $1.5 trillion in infrastructure projects with an emphasis on private spending was never voted on in the House, a different kind of proposal might do better.

Democrats, said Pressmen, would “likely be willing to support something that mainly relies on just federal spending. And Republicans have a reason to go along as well: infrastructure spending would boost economic growth, which is forecast to slow in 2019—just before the 2020 elections.”

By Garry Boulard

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