September 25, 2021- Scranton, Pennsylvania's newspaper, The Times-Tribune, endorsed the creation of the National Infrastructure Bank in a lead editorial today.  Meanwhile, in nearby Wiles-Barre, the Times Leader ran an Op-Ed supporting the NIB, signed by a list of lawmakers and others.

The editorial in The Times-Tribune states:

    "The struggle in Congress over a badly needed $1.2 trillion infrastructure package has revived an excellent idea that would take much of the politics out of infrastructure spending and make it a continuous, rather than sporadic priority — the creation of a national infrastructure bank. 

    State Reps. Eddie Day Pashinski of Wilkes-Barre and Kyle Mullins of Lackawanna County have signed on to a national effort to create such an institution. 

    Alexander Hamilton created such a bank as treasury secretary in 1791. And during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. served the same function. 

    A new infrastructure bank would be modeled on the RFC. It would require a small appropriation from Congress to start, but would not require ongoing funding. Rather, it would buy existing treasury debt from private sector investors at a guaranteed rate of return 2% higher than what they would earn from those bonds. It then would lend money for projects, primarily to state and local governments, at low-interest rates. But advocates calculate that the institution would earn about $80 billion a year on a revolving $5 trillion in loans, with which it would meet its own expenses, pay interest to bondholders and pay a dividend to the Treasury. 

    Projects would be funded according to a cost-benefit analysis, rather than according to the relative clout of politicians, and according to the creditworthiness of the prospective borrower. 

    Congress should take up the idea to fund a host of other needed projects, as a matter of good business rather than bad governance."