[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 155 (Thursday, October 22, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7453-S7455]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRANSPORTATION FUNDING

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I would just note that the Presiding 
Officer and I are on the same schedule, because I come here a couple of 
times a week, but you are here more often than not when I am speaking. 
I am sorry. This is cruel and unusual punishment, I suspect, for you. 
But I welcome the opportunity. Thank you for showing up. Otherwise, I 
would not have a chance to share these thoughts today with the folks 
that are in the Chamber and anybody else who might have tuned in.
  Earlier this year, the Senate actually took up legislation that was 
reported out of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which was a 
6-year Transportation authorization bill. A lot of people who don't 
work here don't realize that for us to spend money--taxpayer money--in 
most cases we have to authorize a program at certain funding levels. 
Then we have to come back and do a second step, and that is to actually 
appropriate the money to spend that has been authorized.
  Usually, if we are authorized to spend $100 in a program, we cannot 
come in and just appropriate a lot more money than that. We have to do 
it within the levels set by the authorization bill.
  Well, we took up on the floor of the Senate the Environment and 
Public Works Committee's 6-year Transportation bill, coauthored by 
Senator Inhofe and Senator Boxer, Republican and Democrat, and reported 
out of the committee unanimously. Most people think we fight about 
everything. Well, we don't. Environment and Public Works Committee 
Senators Boxer and Inhofe have been very good at working together on 
these authorization bills.
  Now, the authorization bill does not contain the funding, but it 
says: These are our transportation policies, and this is the level that 
we think is appropriate. But it does not actually fund a dollar to go 
to those programs.
  Well, over in the House of Representatives today, they got in the 
act. As I understand it, the House transportation committee has 
reported out--I think on a voice vote--their own 6-year authorization 
bill. This is good. It has not passed the House yet, but at least it is 
out of committee, with apparently a fair amount of broad support, which 
is good.
  This is the Senate-passed bill called the DRIVE Act, reported out by 
the committee a couple of months ago and passed the Senate here more 
recently. As you know, we have names for our bills, such as the names 
for cars. But the DRIVE Act, the Senate-passed bill, the Surface 
Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act, has a number--3763. It 
is a 6-year authorization for transportation programs.
  Do these bills have any good ideas in them? Well, they really do. As 
it turns out, there is a fair amount of common ground that these two 
pieces of legislation share, the Senate-passed bill and the bill out of 
the House committee.
  One of them is that there is a new focus on making freight 
transportation more reliable, more affordable, and more efficient. When 
you look at an outfit called McKinsey & Company, a big international 
consulting firm, they have an entity, an appendage of McKinsey, that is 
called the Global Institute. A year or so ago, they opined that a fully 
funded, robustly funded transportation program in the United States 
would provide 1.8 million new jobs in this country--1.8 million new 
jobs in this country--and that it would grow GDP, gross domestic 
product, by 1.5 percent per year--not just one time, but per year. 
Those are pretty amazing numbers, actually, for me.
  Well, one of the things that actually drives the increase in 
employment and the growth in GDP is a more efficient freight 
transportation system and one that actually focuses--as in this 
legislation--on freight, and not just moving our cars, trucks, and vans 
but actually figuring out how we move freight from place to place in a 
more efficient way.

  The second area where there seems to be some agreement is that both 
pieces of legislation prioritize--especially the Senate version--bridge 
safety and large facilities of national importance. Think big bridges; 
think big tunnels. We have a bunch of bridges in this country--I forget 
what the percentage is--that are substandard, not safe--maybe one out 
of every nine. So take your choice for the bridges you are going over. 
Think about that. One in nine is deemed to be essentially unsafe.
  Both of those bills say: Well, that ought to be a priority and we 
would like to authorize higher spending for that. These bills focus on 
clean air funding and toward some of the most dangerous sources of 
emissions--diesel emissions. A lot of it comes from roadbuilding--road 
and highway--and bridgebuilding equipment that is diesel powered and 
puts out harmful emissions.
  Actually, our bill in the Senate does some good things to reduce 
those emissions while we go about building these transportation 
projects. One of the things that I especially like about our bill is 
that it says that eventually we ought to have an approach to funding 
roads, highways, and bridges.
  Maybe it should be something that reflects vehicle miles traveled. We 
don't have that kind of magical system now. In Oregon, they have been 
trying to do it for 10 years. They call it RUC, a road user charge. 
They have maybe 5,000 families that are actually using this. But it is 
a long way from 5,000 families in Oregon to having a national system 
that we can use to come up with money to pay for roads, highways, 
bridges, and transit.
  But our Senate-passed bill establishes research to develop 
alternative user fees to replace, maybe eventually, the gas and diesel 
tax somewhere down the line--not next year, probably not this decade, 
but somewhere down the line. I think that should be a growing part of 
the source of revenues to pay for transportation.

[[Page S7454]]

  The Senate bill even increases--bumps up not hugely but bumps up a 
little bit--the baseline funding and funding for transportation. I wish 
it had been more, but at least it is an effort to do that. Our next 
chart is one of my favorite charts. I have a friend from Montana, a 
former attorney general, former Governor, former chairman of the 
Republican National Committee, whose name is Marc Racicot. Folks from 
his State like to talk about cowboys who really are not cowboys.
  They have a saying out there. They say: All hat, no cattle. In this 
case, we can have all the transportation authorization bills until the 
cows come home, but unless we actually fund them, they are just words 
on a piece of paper, and we don't build a road or a highway or a bridge 
or do anything on the transit side unless we actually fund them. I 
don't know who this guy is, but I love this poster. All hat, no cattle. 
That is where we are right now because we don't have agreement on how 
we are really going to pay for robustly funding transportation 
projects.
  There is an idea out there that goes beyond lousy pay-fors. I think 
the kind of stuff goes like this: We steal money for 10 years out of 
TSA, instead of making our skies safer, and we put that money of 10 
years of revenues into 3 months of helping to fund transportation 
projects. That is not too smart, but we do that. Instead of making 
border crossings in this country safer, where folks are trying to get 
into our country, we use Customs fees for that purpose. But instead of 
using it to make our border crossings safer and our ports of entry 
safer, we put 10 years of Customs fees collected into 3 months or so of 
transportation projects.
  We look at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for which we bought the 
petroleum. We try to buy it low and not use it very much. But we will 
see what we spent in the last couple of years buying and refilling our 
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at $80, $90, maybe $100 a barrel, and now 
we are selling it at basically half of that price.
  You are supposed to buy low and then sell high. That is where you end 
up making your profits. What we are doing with our Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve is to buy high, sell low, and use whatever money we realize to 
help pay for some transportation projects--not a real smart investment 
strategy.
  What Senator Dick Durbin and I have introduced is something we called 
the TRAFFIC Relief Act. It is an acronym. Tax Relief and Fix the Trust 
Fund for Infrastructure Certainty Act of 2015. Here is the real thing 
we need to know about. It raises $220 billion over the next 10 years. 
We raise $220 billion in the next 10 years to go into the 
transportation trust fund.
  If we just want to go, frankly, not to a level of spending that 
actually addresses the problem, then, in fact, we have our roads, 
highways, and bridges get a D-plus. Civil engineers across the country 
every year evaluate our transportation infrastructure. They give us a 
D-plus. ``D'' as in ``dog.'' ``D'' as in ``dangerous.'' ``D'' as in 
``degraded.'' That is when you spend $90 billion a year, which is maybe 
contemplated in the authorization legislation--maybe a little bit more. 
We don't really make much of a dent in the work that needs to be done.
  What we propose in our legislation is $220 billion, and we would have 
$130 billion for new investments in repairs and upgrades. I should be 
able to do some new projects and make a bigger dent in the ones that 
need our attention.

  Let's see what we have in our next chart. I think there is a fair 
amount of support for doing that from what I hear. Let's take a look.
  We looked at a couple of recent editorials that basically say what 
day--I think from these newspapers are from coast to coast, from North 
to South, East to West. Believe it or not, they say we ought to pay for 
transportation--roads, highways, and bridges. It should be that the 
user pays to use the roads, highways, and bridges. They ought to pay 
for them. It is what we have done for years. If we raise the gas and 
diesel tax from 1993--22 years ago, about 18 years ago for the gas tax, 
23 cents for the diesel tax--in today's purchasing power, adjust for 
inflation. So the gas tax is worth less than a dime, not 18 cents, but 
less than a dime. The diesel tax is not worth 23 cents, but less than 
15 cents--probably closer to 12 cents.
  Here is what some of the people say. The New York Times says: 
``Highways Need a Higher Gas Tax.'' They are essentially saying restore 
the purchasing power of the gas and diesel tax. All right? Not add $1, 
not add 50 cents or 25 cents, but restore the purchasing power.
  USA TODAY says: ``Raise the gas tax: Our view.'' They also add: 
``Highway funding hijinks: Our view''--which actually coincides with 
mine.
  Let's see if we have any others. The Washington Post says, and this 
is a very recent one: ``Highway Transportation Fund needs a permanent 
and simple fix.'' Even more recent, editorial board said: ``Congress 
recklessly refuses to top up the Highway Trust Fund.'' Then even more 
recently: ``Congress should fix the gas tax.''
  Again, restore the purchasing power of the gas and diesel tax, not to 
use it for extraneous stuff, not to use it for foreign aid, not to use 
it for Afghanistan or other places around the world, not to use it for 
health care, not to use it for education, but to use it to take these 
roads, highways, and bridges that are deteriorating and actually put 
the money, any extra money we generate, into those. Bangor, ME: ``The 
nation's highway fund doesn't have to continue to lose ground.''
  The Register-Guard--I am trying to remember where that is. I am not 
sure where the Register-Guard is, but it said ``Just raise the gas 
tax'' in an editorial in July.
  Again, the Washington Post opined the same message earlier in January 
of this year. Let's look at that one again. They said: ``With oil 
prices low, now's the perfect time for Congress to raise the gas tax.'' 
That is what they said in January of this year.
  As it turns out, we did some checking. We found out last week, at 
29,000 gas stations across the country, they are selling gas for less 
than $2 a gallon. Think about that: 29,000 gas stations across America. 
The gas station in my neighborhood is at $2.09, and the Washington Post 
opined 7 months, 8 months, 9 months ago that ``With oil prices low, 
now's the perfect time for Congress to raise the gas tax.'' Actually, 
gas prices are about half a dollar lower now than they were then.
  If the Iran agreement is fully implemented, Iran--which now produces 
about 200,000 barrels of oil a day--a year from now they are going to 
be producing about 1 million barrels a day. This suggests to me that a 
world already awash in oil might actually continue to be awash in oil 
for a while, so with the low oil prices, I think there is reason to 
believe they are not going to spike back up any time soon.
  There are more editorials and headlines. The Miami Herald: ``Fix our 
roads.'' Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, OH: ``Raise the gas tax and make 
better policy.'' The JournalStar, which is in Nebraska: ``Follow the 
logic on gas tax.''
  Those are major newspapers across the country. We have also had some 
polling done, not by us, but by the American Road & Transportation 
Builders Association and also by Mineta. Some of us remember Norman 
Mineta, former mayor of San Jose, the Secretary of Transportation who 
worked in both the Republican Bush administration and the Clinton 
administration. In these two recent nationwide surveys, clear 
majorities have indicated support for increasing fuel taxes as a fair 
way to invest in transportation projects.
  This is from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association:

       A Strong Majority Supports Payments to Keep Up With 
     Inflation
       By more than a 2:1 margin, voters support increased 
     payments directed to upkeep of the nation's infrastructure, 
     given the need to keep up with inflation. About 68 percent to 
     70 percent support, strongly support, or somewhat support 
     doing that. We have another recent poll, and these are just 
     representative samples. There are others that are coming out 
     almost weekly now.

  The Mineta Transportation Institute Poll--there is one that gives a 
variety of different options in gas tax, sales tax, and vehicle-miles-
traveled fee. The one that actually gets the most support is a 10-cent 
increase with revenue used just for transportation--not for any other 
purpose, just for transportation--71 percent. I was surprised it was 
this high. People want us to fix their roads, highways and bridges. 
They are tired of paying for repairs to their vehicles.

[[Page S7455]]

  The next quote is from the Philadelphia Inquirer today. They are 
talking to people who read their paper. ``The next time your axle snaps 
or a tire rim is bent on a bumpy highway, consider delivering the 
broken car parts to your congressional representatives''--your 
representatives in Congress, your House Members, and your Senators.
  The average amount of money that we spend on repairs of cars, trucks, 
and vans every year that is related to bad roads and bad bridges is 
anywhere from $350 a year to as much as $500 per year. That is the 
range there.
  I wish to close with sometimes people say you can't vote--we can't 
vote here to do this stuff. None of us will ever get reelected.
  Well, wait a minute. How about the 12 States where in the last 2 
years they actually voted to do this stuff. State highway 
transportation departments get about half of their money from the 
Federal Government, and they raise about half of their money locally. 
Their major sources of revenues locally are taxes and user fees on gas 
and diesel.
  In 12 States in the last 2 years they voted to do this. These are 
mostly red States because there are more red States, at least with 
legislatures and Governors, than blue. But 95 percent of the Republican 
legislatures voted to raise user fees on gas and diesel in their 
States; 95 percent of them were reelected last fall. They won their 
primary; they won their general. They were reelected.
  Who wasn't elected as much? The people who voted against doing that. 
So the folks who actually voted to raise the user fees actually were 
reelected more than the people who voted against it.
  On the Democratic side, in the States where they voted to raise the 
user fees to pay just for transportation--not for anything else--90 
percent of the Democrats were reelected. More legislators were 
reelected than did not get reelected. So just keep that in mind.
  I have said enough. The majority leader is waiting, and I thank him 
for his patience, but here is the long story short: There is a need out 
there. The American people expect us to do something about it. They 
want us to work together. We need not just to have a hat. This can't be 
all hat; there has to be some cattle. Where is the beef? Where is the 
money to pay for all of this stuff?
  I will be back next week to talk about it some more, and I thank the 
majority leader for his patience.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

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