“...extracted from the private economy...”
Why would using government money for contracts to hire private construction workers and buy materials from private manufacturing companies be a bad thing?
I fully realize that government spending doesn’t grow the economy per se - I totally get this. Trump’s plan to bring back our manufacturing to this country, deregulate business and fix the trade deficits are on track for real/actual/tangible economic growth.
These are two separate areas; we need to hire people to fix our infrastructure AND we need to grow the private sector and bring back the jobs that NAFTA sent overseas.
Trump probably sees this as a BOTH/AND scenario.
All in all, infrastructure spending by government is an inefficient way to grow the economy. It may be that infrastructure should be improved but that is a decision which should be made on its own merits not as a job producing measure or sold as such.