Two Articles, A Tale of Two Nations

[_honorentheos]

These two articles were in a professional trade magazine I get:

Canada Digs Into Infrastructure
With record-low oil prices hammering the country’s resource-heavy economy and signs pointing to the onset of a new downturn, Canada’s just-elected Liberal Party government now is aiming to boost infrastructure spending dramatically—doubling, to more than $90 billion U.S. dollars, the federal funding commitment over the next decade.

Obama's 2017 Budget Cuts Many, But Not All, Construction Programs
President Obama’s final budget proposal is filled with minus signs for many major federal construction programs in fiscal year 2017, including General Services Administration new buildings, Army Corps of Engineers civil works and Environmental Protection Agency water infrastructure.

But the $4.1-trillion budget request, sent to Congress on Feb. 9, includes some offsetting hikes, too, including highway and transit programs. They would be in line for increases that track the 2017 numbers in the recently enacted FAST Act, which authorizes $305 billion over five years for highways, transit and passenger rail.

Overall, the Associated General Contractors of America calculates, the Obama FY17 budget includes a total of $141 billion for construction programs, up about 14% from the $123.9 billion in enacted fiscal 2016 construction appropriations.

But all of that year-to-year increase would be accounted for by programs under an Obama-proposed 21st Century Clean Transportation Plan. The plan would total $17.9 billion in 2017, including about $8 billion for the Federal Transit Administration, according to U.S. Dept. of Transportation figures.

The administration would fund the clean transportation plan through a new $10 per barrel tax on oil. But leading congressional Republicans have bluntly rejected the idea. For example, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) called the proposal “little more than an election-year distraction” that was “dead on arrival.”

If the clean transportation plan isn’t adopted, the budget’s 2017 construction total would be about flat with 2016. Moreover, notes Sean O’Neill, AGC congressional relations director for infrastructure advancement, “The major accounts that we do follow did see a decrease almost across the board.”

Let the observation of the experiments begin.