“There is now a consensus that the United States should substantially raise its level of infrastructure investment,” writes former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers in the Washington Post. Correction: There is now a consensus among two presidential candidates that the United States should increase infrastructure spending. That’s far from a broad consensus.

Donald Trump is a competitive person. He likes to have bigger things than other people. He says that he has really big hands. His tax cut was larger than the other GOP candidates. And now he says that his infrastructure plan will be double the size of Hillary Clinton’s.

In this essay on government construction projects, I discuss how promoters use “strategic misrepresentation” to subdue taxpayer opposition and get dubious spending schemes approved. The low-balling of projected costs is a tried and true deception used by infrastructure promoters the world over.

For more than a century, America has been the global leader of the aviation industry. But these days, the government-run parts of the industry are inefficient and falling behind, including airports, security screening, and air traffic control (ATC).

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Scott McCartney reports on the superior air traffic control (ATC) system north of the border. American aviation is suffering from a bureaucratic government-run ATC, while Canada’s privatized system is moving ahead with new technologies that reduce delays and congestion.

Since Margaret Thatcher’s British reforms in the 1980s, more than $3 trillion in government businesses have been privatized around the world, and few have been renationalized. Privatization simply works.

Two decades ago, the Clinton administration proposed restructuring our air traffic control (ATC) system. The idea was to create a self-funded outfit separate from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The problem was that “The FAA has been a big, bungling bureaucracy,” noted the spokesman for the controllers’ union in 1994.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration proposed restructuring our air traffic control (ATC) system, creating a self-funded organization outside of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The idea went nowhere in Congress at the time.

Five years ago, Bob Poole and I wrote that Canada’s privatized air traffic control (ATC) system would be “a very good reform model for the United States.” U.S. policymakers—including the chairman of the House committee that oversees ATC—are now coming around to that view.