I’VE ALREADY EXPRESSED MY DOUBTS ABOUT A BIG TRUMP INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN, but this, alas, seems right: “We’ve spent 35 years having the ‘big government versus small government’ fight. Big government won. You can be mad about it, you can disagree with it, but it is what it is.”

I’m not opposed to better roads and airports, but the truth is, there’s been a lot of money thrown at those projects, and most of it seems to get diverted into graft, consultants, and environmental impact statements. If you really want to see infrastructure boom, get rid of a lot of that federal regulation and the existing money will go far enough to get us more and better new infrastructure than even a huge slug of new cash will get us without such reform. But my approach offers fewer opportunities for graft.