[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 170 (Tuesday, November 17, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H13008-H13009]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1045
                            WE CAN DO BETTER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Too many Americans are out of work. The stimulus 
certainly preserved some public sector jobs and was of benefit to 
public education and filled in some other gaps. But the rest of the 
spending has not been of great impact, particularly the $340 billion in 
tax cuts insisted upon by three Republican Senators. And unfortunately, 
the Obama administration, at the urging of its chief economist, Larry 
Summers, caved in to those demands for yet more ineffective tax cuts, 
something that failed miserably during the Bush era to put the economy 
back on track, and failed again.
  If you don't have a job, a tax cut doesn't do you much good and 
doesn't put you back to work, does it? So it's time for a new approach, 
considered, unfortunately by some, old school. That would be rebuilding 
the infrastructure of America.
  According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we have a $2.2 
trillion infrastructure deficit in this country. One hundred sixty 
thousand bridges on the Federal highway system are either load-limited 
or functionally obsolete. Our transit agencies across America have an 
$80 billion backlog.
  Now, the chief economist for the President, Mr. Larry Summers, an 
academic, doesn't think that infrastructure investment's a good thing. 
He cut it back in the stimulus last spring. But you know, actually, the 
4 percent of that huge bill that went to infrastructure created 25 
percent of the jobs. So perhaps Mr. Summers was wrong yet again, like 
he was when he prevented the Clinton administration from regulating 
derivatives, which caused our world collapse of the economy.
  But he thinks that infrastructure takes too long to spend out. What 
he doesn't understand is, when you have a massive backlog, you have 
projects that can be put on the ground or to work immediately.
  I'll use an example that's kind of close to home for the President. 
The Chicago Transit Authority, they have a $6.8 billion backlog in 
their transit system. They testified before my committee that they 
could spend $500 million tomorrow, tomorrow, productively, bringing 
that system back toward a state of good repair. It would still take 
another $6.5 billion, $6.3 billion, and it would take quite some time.
  Now, they got out of the stimulus $240.2 million for their transit 
backlog. They spent that money productively in 30 days. They bought 
buses. Guess what? You buy a bus, people who make buses have jobs. 
People who make parts for the buses have jobs. We have a ``Buy 
America'' rule. Those jobs are actually here in the United States of 
America, and then those people work and they pay taxes and there's 
revenues to the government; sort of a good old-fashioned way of 
stimulating the economy and helping the deficit. Unfortunately, the 
President's chief economist doesn't believe in this. It's time for him 
to reorient his thinking.
  We need a massive investment in our infrastructure. It is so degraded 
that we have projects ready to go all across the country in transit 
districts, in States with bridge replacement. These aren't things that 
require five to 10 years of planning and a long spend-out and those 
things that those ethereal academic economists think about when they 
think about transportation infrastructure.
  No, when you're in deficit, like the United States of America is 
today, when you're headed toward a Third World transportation 
infrastructure, while our competitors like China are spending hundreds 
of billions of dollars for high speed rail, what are we doing? We're 
struggling to keep Amtrak running at 19th century speeds. That's kind 
of pathetic.
  We can do better. But it will take a commitment, a push by the White 
House, a reorientation in the thinking down there, or perhaps ignoring 
some bad advice they're getting, and have the President champion the 
creation of jobs and the rebuilding of our infrastructure. And you 
know, we can do this in a way that actually wouldn't have to add to the 
deficit.
  They've done a great job of bailing out Wall Street. Goldman Sachs is 
going to be paying bonuses that average $700,000 this year. Whoa, good 
times are here again, except not for an America that is suffering very 
high unemployment. So maybe it's time that Wall Street just gave back a 
little bit. We could reinstitute a tax we had from 1916 to 1966, a 
modest transaction tax.

[[Page H13009]]

Congress, in the last Great Depression, they had the guts to actually 
double that tax. Disaster was predicted on Wall Street. Guess what? The 
economy only went up from there, and tens of thousands, hundreds of 
thousands of people were put to work building a new America, an 
infrastructure that needs rebuilding today.

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