Three Infrastructure Plans: An Analysis

Infrastructure is all around us in our modern world. From the roads we drive on every

day to the electricity pulsing through our light bulbs to the water that flows from our shower

heads, infrastructure affects our daily lives in many ways. Sadly, over the years, the

infrastructure of the United States has been decaying and is need of disrepair. There are

currently three plans to deal with the issue of infrastructure: President Donald Trumps plan, the

Democrats plan, and the Republicans plan. Each one of these plans has numerous benefits as

well as drawbacks. In this paper, one major element of all of these plans will be examined,

namely, their ability to create engineering jobs. Through research and study, the Democrats plan

appears to produce more infrastructure jobs.

Before their engineering job creation capabilities are discussed, some background

information on each of these plans needs to be discussed.

The most unique aspect of Donald Trumps infrastructure plan is that it utilizes both

public and private funds to restore American infrastructure. According to Forbes, Trump has

proposed one hundred and forty billion dollars in infrastructure spending. Approximately forty-

five percent of this investment will be placed in the railway system, and both roadways and

energy will receive fifteen percent of this budget apiece. However, Trumps infrastructure plan

does not stop there. According CNBC, Trumps infrastructure plan also will rely on private

funding, through tax cuts for companies that assist with the construction. Overall, estimates

show that, as Time Magazine calls it, Trumps public-private partnership plan should total

approximately one trillion dollars being put into infrastructure.

This plan does have many potential benefits and drawbacks to it. According to Mason B.

Williams of the The Atlantic, private infrastructure projects tend to be of better quality than
publicly funded ones, as private enterprises are eager to prove their superiority in managing

projects over the government. However, one of the major concerns that Cory Schouten of CBS

News voices is that of profit. Businesses tend to invest where there is profit to be made, which

means that projects that make good money will be the only ones undertaken, regardless of where

the actual needs lie. This also means that certain areas which are less profitable such as water

and sewage, will not receive as much of a private investment as highly profitable enterprises

such as roadways and bridges.

The Democrats plan involves solely public funding. According to The Washington Post,

their plan consists of spending approximately one trillion dollars to improve Americas

infrastructure. Fox News reports that about two hundred and ten billion of these dollars will go

to administering repairs on public roadways and bridges, and another one hundred and eighty

million dollars will be used to upgrade American bus and railway systems.

The obvious benefits of this plan are based upon the concerns over Trumps plan. Unlike

Trumps plan, which follows the profit, the Democrats plan would be able to repair the

infrastructure where it is most needed. However, this plans drawbacks directly stem from the

advantages of Donald Trumps plan. This plan would likely be of poorer quality and not last as

long.

Lastly, the Republicans plan for infrastructure spending is that there should not be any.

They have two primary reasons for this position. First, according to The Washington Post,

Republicans are wary of any large scale spending because the United States has a national debt

of approximately twenty trillion dollars and do not wish greatly increase it. Secondly, they

believe that infrastructure spending creates little to no long-term economic growth, as reported

by Politico.
 The biggest benefit to this plan is that the government save billions of dollars of

government spending. However, this amazing upside comes with the enormous downside that

no infrastructure gets repaired or built.

So how can one determine which infrastructure plan is the best for producing engineering

jobs? This research report will be presented as follows. First, this paper will break down each of

the three plans into its basic components. Secondly, a way of determining a significant number

of engineering jobs will be determined. Thirdly, various infrastructure plans will be examined

and compared to these three plans. Lastly, a conclusion will be made about which plan is the

best in producing engineering jobs.

First, the plans will be broken into components. Trumps plan requires primarily private

infrastructure spending, the Democrats plan utilizes mostly public infrastructure spending, and

the Republicans plan involves no infrastructure spending whatsoever.

Second, a way of determining a significant number of engineering jobs will be stated.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014, there were approximately two and a

quarter million engineering jobs in the United States. Although this may sound like a large

number, there are currently three hundred and twenty five million Americans according to the

U.S. Census. For the purposes of this paper, we will assume that a significant change in the

number of jobs is equivalent to having at least a one percent increase in engineering jobs. By

simple calculations, this would show that there would need to be at least twenty-two thousand

and four hundred new engineering jobs in order to have a significant impact.

Thirdly, various infrastructure projects will be examined. The first place that this paper

will look is at the first major infrastructure project of American history, the foundation of the

Civilian Conservation Corps. during the Great Depression. As stated in An Overview of the
Civilian Conservation Corps., the Civilian Conservation Corps. was founded in 1933 by

President Franklin D. Roosevelt because many Americans were without jobs due to the Great

Depression [134]. This organization would put these men to work on public projects such as

laying roads and constructing telephone lines [134]. While there are no distinct numbers which

state how many engineering jobs were created, CCCLegacy.org reports that there approximately

six hundred thousand officers, supervisors, education advisors and administrators working for

the Civilian Conservation Corps. In this context, it is fair to say that many of the supervisors and

administrators are in fact engineers. For there to have been a significant number of engineering

jobs created, only slightly less than four percent of these jobs would have had to have been

engineers. Although one cannot know for sure, one can reasonably say that a significant number

of engineering jobs were created. Although the circumstances surrounding this example are very

different from our modern day and age, it does prove that the government has the capacity to

create a significant number of engineering jobs. However, although it is possible, it is not

necessarily plausible. The Civilian Conservation Corps. was created specifically to create jobs.

A modern infrastructure project would likely focus more on creating new infrastructure than

creating new jobs.

If you fast forward thirty years, you arrive at the next large-scale American infrastructure

project, the public interstate system. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the

Federal Aid Highway Act which authorized twenty-six billion dollars, or about two hundred and

thirty billion dollars in todays money, of public funds to be spent on creating a U.S. roadway

system, according to History.com. Like in the previous example, one cannot be precisely sure

about how many engineering jobs were created by Eisenhower, it is plausible to say that through

the he did create a significant number of jobs with the Federal Aid Highway Act. Over the
course of Eisenhowers presidency, he created approximately three million jobs. For him to have

created a significant number of engineering jobs, approximately three-quarters of a percent of the

jobs he created must have been engineering jobs. Although one cannot be entirely sure, it is

reasonable to believe that he created a significant number of engineering jobs using public funds.

Using data from past American history, it is reasonable to state that private funds can be used to

create a significant number of engineering jobs.

In the course of this paper, other, more modern studies will also be examined. The first

of these will be examined is a 2014 study conducted by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy

Institute. This study uses three different scenarios to demonstrate job production: where thirty

billion dollars would be spent annually for the duration of a decade, where ninety-two billion

dollars would be spent annually for the duration of a decade, and where two hundred and fifty

billion dollars would be spent annually for the duration of six years. In the first scenario, after

factoring in dozens of factors, it is estimated that there will be approximately thirty-two thousand

jobs created which require a bachelors degree or higher. For a significant number of

engineering jobs to have been made, approximately seventy percent of these jobs would have to

be in engineering, which seems possible, but is not necessarily the case because there are people

with college degrees who manage the monetary side of these projects who are not engineers.

However, in the next scenario, only about thirteen percent of the jobs would need to be

engineering jobs, and in the last scenario only about five percent. From this evidence, it is

apparent that infrastructure has the ability to create a significant number of engineering jobs if

there is significant spending.

This last study will examine the ability of a private-public partnership creates more jobs.

According to Rachel Weber, private-public partnerships are very poor at creating jobs. She
argues that this is because there are mostly concerned with procuring profits for themselves and

do not like the lack of surety in the informal arrangements made by politicians [119].

From this data, it is thereby possible to determine which plan would create the most

engineering jobs. Through the data both from American history and from modern infrastructure

estimates, it is evident that infrastructure spending does create a significant amount of

engineering jobs, thereby ruling out the Republicans plan as the best option for engineering jobs.

This leaves the only two options as being Donald Trumps plan and the Democrats plan. Due to

the last piece of data which states that private-public partnerships creating few jobs, this would

remove Donald Trumps plan from the picture. The only way that Trumps plan could potentially

make a significant number of engineering jobs is if he could create a way to overcome businesses

reluctance to infrastructure projects. Until then, it appears that Democrats infrastructure plan

will create the most engineering jobs.

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