Transcript American Heroes Group Interview with

Economist Alphecca Muttardy

Join U.S. Army Retired Colonel Dr. Damon T. Arnold as he hosts macroeconomist Alphecca Muttardy, Chief Economic Adviser for the Coalition for a National Infrastructure Bank. In this episode, our guest will dive deep into the critical need for a $5 trillion National Infrastructure Bank to revitalize America’s infrastructure and economy. Ms. Muttardy will discuss Congressman Danny Davis's bill, H.R.4052, and how this bank will finance essential infrastructure projects, create millions of well-paying jobs, and address pressing issues like climate change, affordable housing, and job training for veterans.

 Learn about the history behind this proposal and how it could reshape the American economy for the better. 

 HOST: Today is Wednesday September 4th 2024 and I am your host US Army retired Colonel and Veteran combat medic Dr. Damon T Arnold and I have a distinguished guest today, Alphecca Muttardy, a professional macroeconomist, former senior Economist International monetary fund. She's also chief economic advisor for the Coalition for a National Infrastructure Bank. I was able to hear the talks that were given at the DNC, and I'm sure they've done this across the board with different groups, but they are a group that's dedicated to what I think is a genius plan, a genius viewpoint on how to build our infrastructure, and I'm just amazed at the information that I received during that meeting. The discussion is that the Illinois 7th Congressional District Congressman Danny Davis National Infrastructure Bank (NIB) Coalition $5 trillion Bank agenda to fund US infrastructure. Alphecca, Why don't you give us an overview and welcome to America Heroes Group, but I was really blown away by the presenters at the DNC, who were talking about the NIB and why it's so important for us to be supporting this and the people in this country. This is a fantastic idea so why don't you just give us an overview of what this whole initiative is.

 
 ALPHECCA: I am a macroeconomist. That means I look at the big picture of what's happening with the  economy. I worked for 25 years at the international monetary fund and when I retired, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to apply my skills to see if I could help with an American policy that would help the American economy and American workers, and this really is it.   Congressman Davis has introduced a Bill in Congress, H.R.4052, to create a $5 trillion public Bank to Lend for infrastructure projects all around the country. Why do we need one of those? Because we just cannot adequately finance infrastructure either through the federal budget, the state and local budgets, or private capital money. We have money being spent by those different entities but it's not enough. I'll show you some examples in just a minute, but the idea is this bank will complement budgets and top up all the financing that we need to invest in our economy, invest in our country, fix our bridges, and replace all of the lead water service lines. For example, in Illinois, which has the second largest number the country, fix our roads, build High-Speed Rail, build much more affordable housing and restructure the American Workforce, so that we have much better paying jobs for families to enable them to actually pay their bills.  And, it's not a new idea. It's been done many times before in our nation's history. The banks aren't around anymore because they their charters timed out but other countries around the world use our model and they call it the American system and they have permanent banks in place to finance their infrastructure.   

HOST: Phenomenal, yes, you know and I was wondering you know the relationship between this and we had an Act that passed and I think it really blew by the media in a very, in a way that wasn't really focused upon as important a bill as it was an act but the inflation reduction act it was August 16th of 2022 when it passed and it was signed in November you know brought into the you know this International agenda you know I'm wondering what that has to do with the National Infrastructure Bank it seems like it makes it even more important that we have something like an NIB right with the with that in place well. 

 ALPHECCA: Just to go to show you how this evolved over time. When President Biden first came into office he promoted the Build Back Better plan which would have done climate change things, would have fixed infrastructure, would have done a whole host of things, and put it in to the you know at a budget request of $3.5 trillion. Well, when Senators thought about this large price tag they couldn't agree on how they were going to pay for it. They didn't want to raise taxes. They didn't want to deficit spend so they made the thing get smaller and smaller and smaller. They broke it into three bills, the Inflation Reduction Act which is the climate part, the Chips Bill which is intended to stimulate you know electronics and manufacturing that kind of thing, and then the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which was really a reauthorization of in investment spending that the government does reauthorizes every five years. But all together all of those things were small when you compare our need which is $5 trillion, according to the American Society of civil engineers that track 16 of the categories, which the NIB covers, and we add on, you know, the other things that the NIB added on like housing and High-Speed Rail. When you compare that to the Inflation Reduction Act it's only a tenth of all the money that we need so the NIB is a big complement to federal spending and also to state and local spending that can't afford to pay for the infrastructure either. 

 HOST: Yes, and you know one of the things that we're facing now too is also the issue because you brought it up as one of those three arms of the Inflation Reduction Act was the issue about global warming and that is really having a tremendous impact on our infrastructure. We already have an infrastructure that's failing us. I actually was looking at some news reports where some of the signage, actually the poles were falling down in the city, they had been corroded through and they had actually passed inspection prior to their falling, so and we had the bridges that are failing right now. We're seeing all kinds of infrastructure issues right? 

 ALPHECCA: And climate change is making it worse so we had a big backlog of bridges that needed to be fixed and were not paid for through Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act but now we have the climate change impact and it could be anything from extreme heat causing the bridges to buckle or get locked in their place or you know even crumble. According to a new report that came out in the New York Times just yesterday saying that a lot of these bridges could die prematurely because of extreme heat or we have extreme flooding that's eating away at the foundations of the bridge or we could have things like they weren't made resilient from a big super tanker striking them as happened with the bridge in Baltimore Harbor. 

 HOST: You know and actually I was speaking to a friend of mine today and it was really interesting conversation but we were talking about how there were some things where we had some US military people who were actually working on systems but they were younger so when they started to see transistors they said what are those things? There there's really a big need for education right in order for us to be able to engage in this kind of process. Is that part of the plan for the NIB? 

ALPHECCA: I do a monthly newsletter and I call it the Economy and Infrastructure Roundup because the two things are related to each other as goes infrastructure so goes our economy if we don't invest in our infrastructure our economy grows more slowly we run into things like big traffic jams or supply chain problems going through ports or whatever. So the two are definitely related to each other and the bottom line is that this Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the National Infrastructure Bank act will provide enough funding to not only fix all of the infrastructure but actually move the needle on the American economy. It'll create 25 million new great paying jobs family sustaining wage jobs we want to restructure the labor market so that we have people moving out of low paid service jobs and into these better paying technical jobs to repair our infrastructure. We'll be able to fundamentally raise GDP growth rates, which will bring in new revenues to government, solve our debt problem, and we cannot do this all of this through the budget, which has been the traditional approach of Congress. We need a side bank, an off-budget bank, to cover all of these big projects. 

 HOST: That's phenomenal. You know and I was wondering, as far as the involvement of the average citizen in this process, what should we be doing to make sure that the government listens to this, and then there's a second one that I was going to ask you. I'm going start with that question and then I'm going to ask a second question. 

 ALPHECCA: Okay sure so our Coalition is actually a grassroots campaign. We are low-budget and don't get money from anybody. We're all volunteers and we have looped in to help us a lot of state legislators who know what their infrastructure needs that are not being met through their budgets and are very attuned to things that need to be fixed and are causing big problems. New York is flooding, California and New York don't have affordable housing, our energy grid is really running dry because of excess demand, because of excess heat causing you know needing more air conditioning, because of new data centers. All these things are happening. The need is great and so this is an educational program, a thrust of the Coalition. But it is also an opportunity for anybody to have a voice in formulating federal policy and how that they can do that is they can go to our website NIB coalition.com. They can sign up to receive the latest news and events that we're hosting, we usually do a monthly Zoom call nationwide. They can approach their members of Congress and ask them to sign on the bill. They can tell them that traffic in their area is just terrible, that their plumber and their school teacher can't afford to live there or near their place of work. We need to have this bill and it won't cost the federal government a dime. That's the beauty of it, and we have flyers on the website that you can take to your Congressman, whenever they have a town hall meeting and you can bring up the subject and ask them to sign on the bill. 

HOST: You know, historically, I learned a little bit about the history of it. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. I think this is the fourth time this has been done but maybe you could talk about this. 

 ALPHECCA: The very first person who engineered the First Bank of the United States was Alexander Hamilton, in conjunction with our first President George Washington. They recognized that they needed to build America, because we had just won the American Revolution but we were devastated with debt from having fought you know the Revolution and we had no industrial base at all. We were just an agricultural economy, so he wanted to use this bank to start our Industrial Revolution, and built centers in Patterson New Jersey to start manufacturing. It extended through the second generation under Monroe and John Quincy Adams. They built the canal system that was our first transportation system before we even had roads. Abraham Lincoln adopted this. He wanted to have a third bank, but you know this pesky civil war came along and he had also a financial crisis, so instead he adopted our first National Banking System to employ the same method of getting the banks started and built the Transcontinental Railroad. And, the fourth iteration was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation started by Republican Herbert Hoover, picked up by FDR, who used it to get us out of the Great Depression, to build up our military, and to finance big projects to win World War II. It lifted up the whole economy. The afterglow of all that investment was a 20-year period of high growth rate and moving a big segment of our population into the middle class, on account of this investment in our economy. 

HOST: I'm going to paraphrase Albert Einstein. He used to say you know doing something that gives you a bad result over and over again expecting a different result is a bad idea, but it sounds like doing something that's good over and over again a good result is probably a good idea. 

ALPHECCA: Correct and this would be a big complement to our federal policy. There's no other policy that I can think of that will reverse income inequality, will double GDP growth, will solve our debt problem by bringing in more revenues, it makes money for government. And, without that our economy will go backwards and we will decline. The example of comparison is what the Chinese did with such development banks. They have three of them. They used it to build 27,000 miles of High-Speed Rail, build new beautiful train stations, build a whole water grid across their country. We're running out of water. If we don't do something, we won't have food in our grocery stores. That's how serious it's becoming because the drought is in food growing areas and we need to take pay attention to all of that, and there's no money in the budget right now for that.  HOST: That is such an important point. I remember with the American Public Health Association I actually gave a presentation with some of my colleagues and it was talking about the water wars you know and how those wars are going on in our Southern States, now Nevada, and they're fighting over water because that's really a critical issue, and it's really basic survival.  ALPHECCA: We have $400 billion dollar in the bank the national Infrastructure Bank dedicated just to water supply in addition to all the rest of the $800 billion for water infrastructure like sewage and drinking water. And, what our aim is to really and see if we can boost up supplies in the South, the dry Southwest. It's a little bit of a break right now. They had rainfall last year but the Colorado River, the whole system is still declining, and we could lose power and water to seven states that supply those things to 40 million. That’s one third of all residents in the southwest that benefit from that Colorado River system which is running dry. 

HOST: So that includes homes, schools, hospitals, clinics. Everything is a public health issue. We have to respond to this. You know one of the things that members also can actually contact their Congressional members saying that this is something that you need to do, and give them real examples in your area of things that you need, like less traffic, and more affordable housing, those kinds of things. That's critically important you know. We just don't pay enough attention to our economy, and people just don't pay attention to their finances. Many times, and I know you're looking at it as a macroeconomic level but even at a micro level people have to realize you need to be involved in this process and know that you're part of the picture too. That you're actually doing things that can affect your outcome, and how things are going. The bill HR4052 is something that people should be you know writing into the Congressional members about to support this initiative, and I know that Congressman Davis was like the chief sponsor of the bill itself, but he has many people who are aligning with him in a congressional level, as well as bipartisan. 

ALPHECCA: We don't have Republicans yet but we're actively seeking them, and we've talked to at least 150 Republicans about the needs in their district. Up until now infrastructure had always been a bipartisan issue, but the question is, with big budget deficits, and sort of fights over what's going to be in the next budget, this has kind of fallen off the table. Every member of Congress is very attuned to listening to their constituents. If you get enough of them talking to the same member that's how we were able to bring on all of the 40 members that are on co-sponsors of the bill so far.

 HOST: And, this is one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about the success that China's had with those three banks. It provided jobs, it provided training and education, because you can't put a High-Speed Rail together if you don't have trained workers right? That's something that we're sort of falling behind in the world. So, it's an issue of National Security, and you know our sovereignty as well. And, there's a big role for veterans to play in this too. 

ALPHECCA: I mean there are programs around like helmets to hard hats where we want to retrain veterans in these great paying skilled jobs. There are some of them that use the latest technologies, new water systems, putting up a new and enhancing an electric grid, so that it can accept renewable energy, coming off of new generation plants. It can also provide areas that are fast-growing or have lots of data centers. These are really on the cusp of things. That if we can't keep the lights, it's not going to go well for us. 

 HOST: One of the things you just brought up it was really interesting is that you know we also now we're talking about infrastructure hardening you know making sure that as we're rebuilding we had the right technology we had the right skill level and then we have the right fiscal backing to make sure that it's implemented correctly yes and uh so that that's really uh an important very important issue we actually had someone on the last show that was from the Department of Labor and he was talking about veteran jobs and you know the program that they have and it was really a good thing you know but I can see the intersection of this and also with the educational system that we have to realize that we cannot no longer go without training people on uh the basic requirements we have artificial intelligence out here now we have all kinds of you know Technologies coming out and if we're not train training our citizens to be able to command those jobs you know and bring some of those jobs back home this we need the infrastructure for that.

 ALPHECCA: A lot of this infrastructure is quite complicated to develop especially when you have uh older cities with very old infrastructure and you have to do a lot of drilling and things like that you want to watch a documentary on one of the most beautiful things that I've ever seen was the construction of the Cross rail in London that that cost2 billion do but it's like building a jumbo jet in the air while it's flying it was it was really quite amazing uh technology just to roll something out like that and we want our workforce to be able to and our construction companies to be able to do it at the same time.   HOST: Okay, great, well we have about four minutes to go I was going to ask you is to actually give your website again and a way that people can actually tune into what you're doing I think this is this is one of the most critical meetings I've ever gone to in the last several years because I feel like this is such an issue that is so germane to our survival and to making sure that we come out of this the right way. We hope to have you back on multiple times in the future but in the short term you know bill HR4052 is something that everyone needs to know about need to know about the National Infrastructure Bank and what its proposal is to Congress and to write your Congressional members you can write Congressional members even if they're in your District I have Republican and Democratic you know and and say you know this is something that we need to do you know come to the table in a bipartisan way and let's get this done we have to save our nation we we're talking about saving democracy now we need to save our nation's infrastructure and make sure it's viable for generations. What do you think we should be doing as a nation you know and what's your vision?  ALPHECCA: My vision is to make it an even playing field for all Americans. We need to reboot our middle class, we need to help our poor, we need to solve our debt problem. And we can do all of that with this bank, which is big enough to fix everything, invest in our economy and help the American worker to be much better off with a great paying job.

 HOST: Well it sounds like this National Infrastructure Bank Coalition has an incredible macroeconomist who is leading that discussion and I am so happy because when I when I was talking to him they said she must come on so for the show but we will have you back on again with Congressman Davis. I know he's always very busy doing things for the community and for the nation, so and as you are so thank you very, very much for securing our nation and making sure veterans have a future and their families. 

ALPHECCA: Thank you for having me.