Sanders Slams Trump Infrastructure ‘Scam’ As ‘Corporate Welfare’

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) criticized President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to increase infrastructure spending as a “scam” that would benefit private corporations.

In a statement published on Medium Monday afternoon, Sanders called Trump’s plan “a scam that gives massive tax breaks to large companies and billionaires on Wall Street who are already doing phenomenally well.” He also described the President-elect’s infrastructure proposals as “corporate welfare.”

A policy paper by Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro published in October, when both men were senior advisers on the Trump campaign, suggested offering corporations tax breaks to partially cover the initial equity investments for infrastructure projects. Ronald A. Klain, who oversaw the team implementing the American Recovery and Renewal Act from 2009-2011, and advised Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, wrote about that proposal on Friday in the Washington Post.

“[T]he Trump plan would not be a reasonable compromise — acceptance of its huge tax breaks for construction investors and profits for contractors would be a wholesale concession,” Klain concluded.

In his Medium post, Sanders also mentioned Trump’s plan to allow corporations with profits stored overseas to re-patriate that profit at a lower tax rate. In August, Trump said that rate would be 10 percent.

“Trump would allow corporations that have stashed their profits overseas to pay just a fraction of what the companies owe in federal taxes,” Sanders said.

Sanders also unfavorably compared Trump’s plan to his own infrastructure proposal, the Rebuild America Act. The Vermont senator wrote that “Unlike Trump’s plan, which creates new tax loopholes and is a corporate giveaway,” his own plan would eliminate “tax loopholes that allow hugely profitable multinational corporations to stash their profits in offshore tax havens around the world.”