Schumer: Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan ‘Sounded Good to Me’

This week on ABC’s News’ podcast ,“Powerhouse Politics” with Jon Karl and Rick Klein, incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)  said President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed trillion-dollar infrastructure plan “sounded good to me.”

Schumer said, “President-elect Trump has called me four or five times and we have had cordial conversations.”

When asked about the infrastructure plan, Schumer continued, “I’ve talked to him a little bit about this and I have told him, and you know, I told him that Democrats have always believed in a big broad infrastructure bill. We think it should be large. He’s mentioned a trillion dollars, I told him that sounded good to me. But I told him that you couldn’t do the kind of infrastructure building we need in America with just tax breaks where about eighty cents on the dollar goes to the investor and not enough moneys goes to the highways. Furthermore, with tax breaks you need good revenue stream to pay them back and a lot of our projects don’t merit that.”

“So I told him that and I told him that you know, if he’s going to cut Medicare or Social Security or education, these standard programs for this, that would not meet with our favor,” he continued. “I said to do this in the way we wanted to do it he would need to alienate a good number of his right wing Republicans — these were the folks that held up a much smaller infrastructure bill for five years in the House — and he said he realized that. And so we’ll see what happens. On the administration in general, I don’t think anybody knows what they are going to do. I have said both publicly and privately to the President-elect that he was elected on opposing both the Democratic and Republican establishments. If he sort of gets captured by the Republican establishments, especially the hard right part of it, which many of his cabinet choices seem to indicate the direction he’s moving, I said he’s going to have rough— I think he wouldn’t be a successful president.”

(h/t The Hill)

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