Any family that sets aside $2,000 a year gets a tax break–the contributions are deductible while the account grows tax-deferred. Low-income families that save $1,000 a year to cover child or elderly care would be eligible for a matching $500 contribution.

The only problem is that these same low-income families can’t afford to save $1,000 a year–half of all households earning under $30,000 have absolutely no savings. Even more to the point, 47 percent of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency. And once again, Donald Trump has made these benefits tax-deductible, but households that do not pay income taxes (like the low-income families this plan purports to target) would not receive its benefits.

The biggest beneficiaries would be high-income households, gaining yet another tax shelter by setting aside money for childcare or elderly care costs they could already afford.

One of the problems that are going to become more apparent as cyber security occupies more of the public consciousness is that there are few, if any, norms surrounding cyber warfare, meaning it’s not set in stone what response any particular cyber attack warrant.

If a country interferes in your election, do you wait for their next one to respond or disrupt the current government or abstain entirely from a cyber attack? How do you respond to the theft of a private company’s records? What about the discovery of inactive malware inside a utility’s database? What kind of response do stateless actors demand?

Deterrence is already a pillar of international order as prescribed by the United States, but it will only grow as nations unevenly develop offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. Defense Secretary Ash Carter explained in an April 2016 Vox interview that the theory goes like ”you scare someone away from doing something you don’t want them to do by making them fear the consequences.“

Underpinning the theory of deterrence are two clear principles that have helped prevent nuclear conflict, but it’s not clear whether those principles can or will translate to the digital world:

The first, denial, involves convincing would-be attackers that they won’t succeed, at least without enormous effort and cost beyond what they are willing to invest. The second is punishment: Making sure the adversaries know there will be a strong response that might inflict more harm than they are willing to bear.

On top of this, nuclear weapons have inherent limitations on prospects for their use. Only actors capable of affording the incredible expense of nuclear weapons pursue them. They’re devastating but have a litany of norms established by international institutions and agreements which prevent their proliferation.

Cyber weapons have none of the limitations experienced by nuclear weapons.

State and non-state actors alike can develop cyber offensive capabilities. There is no history of an international framework of institutions or agreements that dictate the terms of their use or existence. Cyber weapons can be deployed anonymously or deceptively which complications retaliation, and they are not immediately catastrophic like nuclear weapons (this complicates incentives for discouraging the use of cyber weapons since their effects exist on a spectrum and do not directly result in hundreds of thousands of casualties, like nukes).

Even with deterrence strategies, it is a miracle that nuclear conflict hasn’t broken out. In cyberspace, where a deterrence strategy is not likely to take hold soon, we are sitting on a powder keg that can only grow as Donald Trump’s cyber security policy grows to increasingly be shaped by hawks willing to wage indiscriminate war for peace.

In the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s election victory, a cyber security team and policy failed to take shape. It was reported by the business magazine, Fortune, that

[current and former national security officials] and multiple sources involved with the Trump transition organization said they were unaware of any person in the Trump orbit who is dealing specifically with cyber security, and that there has been minimal contact with federal agencies.

While Donald Trump has unleashed endless rhetoric about cyber security, he has been vague on details in interviews, speeches, and his website (this is the briefest of his policy stances pages). This is a reason for concern mainly because of the factions that define Trump’s administration. The presence of different groups with different agendas and differing levels of power or experience competing for influence within Donald Trump’s orbit will almost certainly lead to a defective cyber security agenda.

There have been some attempts to smooth this over, however. A bipartisan congressional task force published a detailed cyber security report on January 5th, much more comprehensive than Trump’s own “vision,” and highlighting legislation along with executive agency overhauls that could improve America’s cyber offensive and defensive capabilities.

Donald Trump’s luxury hotel chain was hacked twice inside of one year and its credit card systems compromised. [Tech Times, April 5, 2016]

In economics, an externality is an indirect effect on parties not involved on a transaction. With the extraction of resources for energy production, the externalities we run into are negative–companies involved in transactions are mainly concerned with the immediate economic cost of production and its potential for profit as opposed to the hidden costs of resource extraction.

Donald Trump’s energy infrastructure plans may, after all the direct costs are tallied, yield tens of billions of dollars for taxpayers and private companies, but what are the indirect costs?

In 2011, a group of researchers from around the country attempted to calculate that number. They examined the full cost of coal’s “lifecycle” in the United States—that is, the costs of everything that mining coal, transporting it, burning it for electricity, and disposing it does to the world … The United States’ dependence on coal cost the public “a third to over one-half of a trillion dollars annually,” they wrote … “If we were to go back to do what we did in this paper,” said Jonathan Buonocore, a research fellow at Harvard who worked on the study, “the numbers could go up.”

It’s also important to note that the costs and profits are not evenly distributed. While the profits are concentrated within pockets of coal companies, and the benefits are experienced as relatively cheap electricity across the country, the costs are experienced mainly by regions where the most coal extraction goes on (the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the Appalachian).

West Virginia is probably the most illustrative example of this trend, having experienced a total collapse of living conditions thanks to the coal industry. At the same time, however, we are watching as this trend evolves and transforms entire towns, states, and regions into the ultimate manifestations of negative externalities as public health declines, job prospects dry up, environmental degradation collapses, and public safety nosedives.

Trump rightly points out that there are hundreds of school and daycare drinking water systems which are failing, but does not point out that many of them failed after experiencing the same privatization that this infrastructure plan promises nationwide.

Flint, Michigan’s water system was run by French multinational water engineering services Veolia. Their negligence and fraud culminated in a failure to disclose substandard corrosion control measures or high levels of lead in drinking water, then dismissing the legitimacy of any related medical claims. Michigan AG’s filing a civil suit which seeks ”hundreds of millions of dollars, for harms caused by Veolia and LAN in Flint”.

This isn’t the first time that Veolia has ruined a city’s drinking water, having run Pittsburgh’s into the ground over the span of 2012 to 2015. In the name of saving costs, Veolia downsized the water quality testing staff, fired or laid off safety and water quality managers, and flat out avoided following environmental guidelines.

And Veolia is just one example of a well-established trend–privatizing water decays its quality.

Besides the ten page pre-election white paper penned by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Director of the National Trade Council Peter Navarro, the Trump campaign has neglected to release any empirical data backing up these claims.

There are only a few places, so far, that have given Trump’s plan an actual look and so they’re the closest we will get to a grounded economic analysis.

The first is the Bloomberg Review, which mapped out both political and economic roadblocks to the full realization of Trump’s plan, casting doubt on its promised benefits for the private sector and Americans as a whole.

On the political side, the biggest barrier to Trump’s plan is the GOP itself, reluctant to approve the $500 billion in direct spending or the “Buy American” protectionist provisions Trump calls for.

Economically, Bloomberg points out that at best Trump’s infrastructure scheme may bring a few hundred thousand jobs, a far cry from the 3.3 million jobs his advisors have promised. There are also concerns about how realistic his plans for funding this program are, namely because “[y]ou’d end up with bigger deficits and higher inflation that could push up interest rates, which could make funding the deficit even more difficult.”

The second is from a progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, that focuses largely on the economic consequences of Donald Trump’s plan to make infrastructure great again.

To summarize the five main flaws they found with Trump’s plan

1. The plan would push state and local governments to use equity capital that can cost 300 percent to 500 percent more than capital raised through traditional municipal bonds.

2. The plan would provide no support for thousands of critical maintenance and reconstruction projects.

3. The plan would raise taxes on middle-class Americans in the form of high-cost tolls and other user fees necessary to satisfy the 10 percent to 14 percent annual returns demanded by equity investors.

4. The plan would leave behind rural communities and smaller cities and towns that are not large enough to generate sufficient toll or other user fee revenues to satisfy equity investors.

5. The plan would not meaningfully increase total economic activity, employment, or real wages.

All in all, there is no indication that this infrastructure plan will deliver on any of its many promises, let alone find support among GOP lawmakers who have already started to move against Trump’s dream of billions in handouts to investors and contractors.