Thank you all for coming. Welcome to infrastructure week. We have been looking forward to this for a while. Infrastructure was a thing that all pundits after the election when we are in the fractured state after the 2016 election, democrats and republicans, will they be able to work on anything . People said infrastructure. Why . Democrats like spending money and donald trump likes having things build. He sees himself as a builder. So, we were supposed to get something. We have not gotten something yet. Policy proves more complicated in practice than in promise. That is the complexity of this. That is why we assembled the excellent panel we have today. Anybody who follows staff about transportation infrastructure, the way cities work follows nicole. She is a senior fellow at the manhattan then we have nick of the heritage foundation. He is an economist. He is a Deputy Director of the thomas road to toot for Economic Policy studies. And finally we have Heritage Action tim chapman. He is the director at Heritage Action and they have been pulling on this issue about infrastructure and transportation. So, thank you panelists. I want to start off and say, ask in general, do we need a 2 trillion infrastructure bill and if so, what specifically should be in it . Thank you, i want to thank you for having us here today. The answer to do we need 1 trillion infrastructure bill or a 2 trillion infrastructure bill is no. Do we need an infrastructure bill, that is yes. The problem is, when we focus on these big numbers come a we do not get to the goal. We saw this with the obama error, era stimulus where this was billed as a nearly trillion dollar infrastructure bill. Obama used the bill transformative when he rolled this out in early 2009. Many of the projects in the bill never came to fruition. If you think about a highspeed rail network were president obama said at the time, we are going to build the backbone of a new Transportation Network across the country, but the marquee project of this High Speed Rail Network say it has highspeed rails up and down california. They have built barely anything in more than a decade since this was announced. To get to Real Infrastructure emma the last thing we need is to put the number first. The first thing we should be doing is having all 50 states in the major regional areas in each state put together a realistic list of what are their immediate infrastructure needs that are actually achievable within the next decade. Then, how much do those infrastructure needs cost. Then we arrive at a number that is more realistic than 1 trillion or 2 trillion. Then we get to the hard part which is actually executing these projects. We are very good about announcing projects and making his releases and press conferences, but we are not very good at getting them done you remember the old seinfeld joke, it is easy to make the car reservation and take the car reservation, it is much harder to have the car there waiting for you once you go to retrieve your reservation. We are the same way with our Infrastructure Projects. It is the execution that will matter in the end. And to build off nicoles last point, when you think about what resident obama says when he passed the stimulus project, he says those shovel ready jobs were not as shovel ready as they initially anticipated. A big part of that was the regulatory obstacles that we face when Building Infrastructure. Think of just one single project like the pipeline. If you look back to when transcanada announced they were going to expand their keystone system with xl down to the gulf coast, barack obama had not even announced that joe biden was his running mate yet. If you had a child on the day that transcanada submitted its application to the state department, that child would be entering middle school this september. That is just one pipeline project. If you expand that to all of the Infrastructure Projects that we have whether it is traditional Infrastructure Projects in highways and bridges, energy Infrastructure Projects like pipelines even Renewable EnergyInfrastructure Projects are all facing these systemic regulatory problems whether it is labor regulations, environmental regulation, just outright nimby ism, sporadic changes in zoning laws, all of these things adversely impact the ability to get these projects done. I agree but let me try to answer the question from a different perspective. The question is whether we need 1 trillion or a 2 trillion infrastructure package has been asked. We have done a significant amount of polling here. The back drop to what we are trying to do, we are looking at the Political Coalition that brought trump into power in 2016. That coalition we see is suburban republicans, grassroots conservatives and workingclass americans. Workingclass americans were new to the coalition and came in because they liked a lot of things that trump was saying, specifically on issues like infrastructure. So, we have done almost 500,000 in pulling to look at these different areas. We have pulled nationally, in battleground states, we have pulled in bluecollar district, suburban districts and what you see is that overwhelmingly, there is an appetite for an Infrastructure Program. When the program is described as roads and bridges, we are not talking about mass transit or that kind of thing. But roads and bridges are overwhelmingly popular. That probably does not surprise a lot of people. If you look at just within the republican base, registered republicans, you asked them very simple questions. Do you support 1 trillion federal Spending Program for roads and bridges, the answer is 78 support that within the republican party. The point here, then the numbers go up when you start looking into those districts and they competitive districts. You understand why members of congress on the republican side, we wonder why conservatives are so excited to sign onto an infrastructure bill it is because their constituents are. Numbers go down when you talk about do you support this bill if it gives sweetheart deals to labor unions or if there are contracts where there are is corruption, numbers fall to the bottom. There is a way to fight back against some of these massive, bloated enteral bills. My point is that this is a politically salient issue that will probably come if trump is reelected and will be one of the first things they try to do. So, conservatives have to figure out how to be part of shaping this. If we do not shape it, if you just let the administration shape it and you let them work with democrats to cut the deal, it is going to end up looking a lot different than we would like it to look. Is the importance i think of this panel and what we are talking about today. What actually is that . Speak when people say they support a bill, they have Different Things in mind. When nancy pelosi was asked about it, she says it is about jobs. She said something about economic efficiency and then throws in saving the planet. Donald trump when he talked about it in the state of the union, he said, we will build gleaming new roads across bridges and roadways and waterways across this land. That is very trump ian. It shines like gold. But, when you are pulling people, if youre asking me about infrastructure i am thinking maybe you are going to fill some potholes. Maybe you will add one more lane or a sidewalk. Dont we mean 13 Different Things . Should Congress Pick something and focus on it, what would you do if somebody said, where should the infrastructure money go . That is the first question. What is infrastructure. The reason we see some of these big numbers, engineers come out every three years with their big report that we have a 3 trillion infrastructure deficit. That is based on an overly broad definition of infrastructure. The first thing we need to do in coming up with a number, do we need 1 trillion, 2 trillion, pulling these numbers out of the air, is what is the role of the federal government in paying for infrastructure. That is the number we should be thinking about. Most infrastructure is private sector infrastructure or it is local and state infrastructure. If we think about pipelines, if we think about electricity, if we think about water, these are all things that are paid for through peoples utility bills. Whether private sector, if you have a private sector electric companies or through your municipal water bills, except for in extraordinary circumstances, it is a very board, a very poor town for example, they pay for themselves. That many covers the cost of paying for the electricitys capital plant as well as all the employees. There is really no need for government involvement except with some of the regulatory issues. Same thing with an oil pipeline, gas pipeline, if it does not pay for itself, there is probably something wrong with it. We should listen to that market signal that there is not enough demand for the project. That the cost of building the project is too high and so forth. Much of the rest of our infrastructure, local potholes, local road and bridge maintenance, these are state and local issues. Three out of every four infrastructure dollars are spent at the state and local level. There are some ideas out there about making more of our highways into highways. We can talk about that a little bit later and some of the positives and negatives of that. But the infrastructure that does not pay for itself is in general your Larger Network road projects where there is a federal role. Your larger mass transit projects, the gateway tunnel for example. Dam projects to protect against Flood Control because there is no efficient mechanism to get everyone to pay for their share of the dam. These are the things we are talking about. It is a much smaller universe than the broad utilities part of it. I think a big problem is that four of the dollars are not going to the projects. Generally, right now we have an Infrastructure Spending system that incentivizes the siphoning of federal resources to go to projects that are state and local in nature. It is kind of like when you go out to eat with a group of your friends. If you go out to eat with a group of your friends can spit the bill, split the bill among 10 people. One but he gets a cup of side salad and soup when he is footing the bill, his suddenly getting the stake. That is what you get with these massive Infrastructure Spending practice, packages. Your spreading the cost. And then you get wasteful projects or projects that are simply local or state in nature. You have things like spending on bike paths and recreational trails. That is not to denigrate the value of those project players, i love biking and recreational trails, but i think the people who derive the most value from using them are the ones that should be paying for them. So, let me ask you. Does your polling go granular as to what the priorities are whether it is new versus maintaining, roads versus bike trails, etc. . We listed, im not going to remember the exact numbers, but we listed different categories of Infrastructure Spending. Roads and bridges, bike trails, those kinds of things. It was overwhelmingly that roads and bridges are what people thought Infrastructure Spending was. If republicans are going to do this right, they need to begin talking now about what they are going to do in 2020 if the president is reelected. I think to do it right, they actually have to shift the ground that they are debating the democrats on. Nancy pelosi talks about this as a jobs bill. That is a popular political message. That is how i would be talking about it if i were her. Republicans need to take a step outside of this traditional debate which is been about what is the federal government going to do and how much is the federal government going to spend on a big Infrastructure Program and say this is bigger than infrastructure. I would talk about this as a jobs and work program. I would recommend that the president say look, heres what we are going to do. We are not going to play on the democrats turf. We are going to do an Infrastructure Project in states and localities. We are going to have private partnerships, this is not just infrastructure. This is just more than roads and bridges. This is putting this country back to work. There are a host of other areas that he can dovetail into this when it comes to work and the dignity of work. This is important especially for that part of his coalition that think of you probably saw axios piece yesterday morning that showed the flip districts that went for obama before they flipped and went for trump are doing less well in terms of the economic recovery than other districts across the country. He still needs to be making the case that he is helping the working class american. So we have all sorts of policies here at heritage we have been championing. Things like Higher Education reform where you put on par the federal subsidy that he gave it people who go to fouryear liberal arts school and say if somebody is going to vocational or apprenticeship training, you should get that training. Why should working class americans be subsidizing upper class americans . Put that in an infrastructure bill. Put welfare reform in an infrastructure bill. Skillsbased immigration in an infrastructure bill and change the debate. Make the debate actually something that is a broader and captures the publics imagination in a way that i think the democrats cannot compete with. When they are trying to fight on Higher Education, they are going to get beat. You see what Elizabeth Warren is doing on her bailout for higher ed. You see what Bernie Sanders is doing. I would like to attack it in that way. That allows you to actually push a lot of spending down to the state and local level and but the bigness of the bill allows you to still be broad and aspirational. It seems that i have never seen republicans win a fight of who will spend more money, including too crea including to create jobs. It could or should be a jobs bill . It should only be a jobs bill in the sense that better infrastructure makes the private sector more productive. We think about infrastructure the wrong way when we think it should create Public Sector jobs or heavily subsidized Construction Industry jobs. Of course, its wonderful that jobs are a byproduct of Building Infrastructure and people who work Building Infrastructure, engineering infrastructure, these are important jobs, but that is not the point of the infrastructure. The point of the infrastructure is to support the private sector. Now, of course these jobs should pay whatever is necessary to attract qualified workers, but one of the issues with infrastructure bills is the state issue of prevailing wages. In new york, for example, state law says that if you are working on a public works project, the wage for a basic laborer is close to 50 an hour, but the health care and pension benefits above that that go into the hourly wage bring the cost closer to 100 an hour. And as you go up the scale of the the scale of the work, your operating engineers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, the wages are higher. There is nothing wrong with that. The other side of the prevailing wage laws is the inefficient work rules that are embedded in these contracts between the Construction Contractors and the construction unions. For example, if ive got a job that requires plumbing, electricity and painting, i need three separate people to do these three separate jobs even if the work is incidental in any one of these areas, that you just need someone to hook up the plumbing. You just need someone to hook up the electricity. Its not complex skilled work. You still need three separate people on the job site. There is a lot of inflexibility in these union contracts. I remember being at the Democratic Republican Convention in 04 and getting yelled at by a union guy. He says you are not ibew, yet you are doing electricity distribution. I am a reporter much i was plugging in an extension cord. He showed me i was doing stuff that only Union Workers were allowed to do. Thats not to say we want to to throw away unions. Its just to say any federal infrastructure bill has to nod to the reality that we need, first of all, these contracts need to be made public. Right now the contracts between Construction Contractors and construction unions are considered private contracts that the rest of us cant see even though part of our money goes to pay for it. And once the contracts are public, we need to see a lot more efficiencies in terms of the work force productivity. So we are getting more infrastructure for every dollar we spend. Let me ask you, saying that the way infrastructure creates jobs is by supporting business, allowing more efficient shipping, commuting, that sort of thing. And that gets back to the question of, well then how should we fund it and who should be paying for it . If its creating Economic Opportunity, then the people for whom its creating Economic Opportunity ought to be paying for it, right . There are a million debates over how re fund roads. Im from new york, and most highways are tolled. Almost every bridge is tolled. You go down south and tolls are, you know, thats the least i think whats your least popular opinion . I think we should pay for high