The parallel with 1921 to get America

 The parallel with 1921 to get America

 headed in the right direction rests in renovating and modernizing infrastructure for the 21st century, creating a new boom and new economic opportunities to neutralize this dissatisfaction. Infrastructure is broadly defined and not limited to highways, bridges, airports, water, fuel and electrical grids to broadband, education, supply chain reliability, quantum computing, biogenetics, health care and fusion. Infrastructure, writ large, offers the same potential for explosive growth as automobiles did a century ago.  

If wisely mobilized, literally tons of money is available to propel this growth — nearly $7 trillion  from the American Rescue Plan; the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; the Chips and Science Act; the Inflation Reduction Act and the omnibus laws. Not all will go to infrastructure. But a significant amount will. Yet, how oversight, management and coordination of all this spending will be conducted is problematic and probably insufficient.  

The solution is to create a national infrastructure bank financed by federal funds taken from the nearly $7 trillion already appropriated and matched by the private sector. The goal would be to raise $4-5 trillion, sufficient to have lasting effect. Private investors would receive bonds guaranteed by the U.S. Government at 1 or 3 percent over prime and paid for by user fees, tolls and a novel approach used in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) following the financial crash of 2008.