[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 12057]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     TAX REFORM AND INFRASTRUCTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the groundwork that is 
being carefully laid by Senate Finance Chair Baucus and Ways and Means 
Committee Chair Camp. It's absolutely essential that we reform a tax 
code that is hopelessly complex, unfair, and often counterproductive. 
The system is reaching the point of breakdown. The complex patchwork is 
difficult to administer, invites tax engineering, if not outright 
evasion, and is hugely expensive for those who are just trying to meet 
their obligations.
  Through mistake and evasion, we lose approximately $365 billion of 
revenue each year that should be paid to the Treasury--$1 billion a 
day--and the estimated cost of compliance is $168 billion. With 
simplification and careful enforcement, we could easily gain tens of 
billions of dollars of revenue and allow individual taxpayers and 
businesses to shift resources away from compliance and tax engineering 
to growing the economy and providing for our families.
  While we all may disagree with some fundamentals, it would be a 
mistake to begin with our areas of disagreement. I commend the chairmen 
for working to build common understanding on a path forward.
  There is one area that has not been part of the tax reform discussion 
but is every bit as critical as solving our budget deficit, and that's 
to deal with our infrastructure deficit. Every day brings more stories 
of a Nation slowly falling apart and falling behind other nations that 
are modernizing their infrastructure, like Japan, China, India, and the 
European Union, all of whom spend more of their economy on 
infrastructure than does the United States.
  Last week's potential water emergency in Prince George's County 
underscores a point made by my friend, Representative Don Young from 
Alaska: we leak more water than we drink; 1.9 trillion gallons of water 
is lost due to inadequate infrastructure underground. It is water, 
sewer, the electrical grid, transit, roads and bridges--the American 
Society of Civil Engineers has estimated we need to spend $2.3 trillion 
in the next 5 years just to maintain basic standards.
  Transportation reauthorization finance is under the committee's 
jurisdiction, and it's fast approaching, with a highway trust fund 
unable to meet even current inadequate requirements. This resource gap 
prevented us from being able to enact a full 6-year reauthorization 
last Congress, hence, we're facing it again next year.
  In the 20 years since the gas tax was last increased, the purchasing 
power of the fund has eroded dramatically due to inflation and 
increased fuel economy, so that the average motorist is only paying 
about half as much per mile as they did in 1993.
  The failure to meet the revenue needs has required increased 
borrowing from the general fund, adding $55 billion to the deficit just 
to meet the current inadequate levels. At the same time, we've seen a 
collapse in the construction industry, costing hundreds of thousands of 
family wage jobs and slowing our economic recovery.
  Resources have become increasingly inadequate to meet basic 
transportation needs, but at the same time the consensus among key road 
users in support of an increase has grown ever stronger.
  A vast coalition has emerged in support of raising the fuel tax, 
which includes business, the professions, organized labor, 
nongovernmental organizations, the truckers, transit, and cyclists. The 
list of supporters is as long as it is varied.
  Allowing an inflationary increase for the highway trust fund was part 
of the Clinton deficit reduction plan back when we had balanced 
budgets. More recently, it was included in the recommendation of the 
chairs of the President's deficit reduction committee, Alan Simpson and 
Erskine Bowles. Making infrastructure a part of the larger tax reform 
proposal will meet a critical and growing need for our economy. It will 
help satisfy the concerns of those who were insisting on more revenue, 
but do so in a manner that's supported by a broad, diverse, and 
powerful coalition of interests.
  We all have a stake in funding to rebuild and renew America. It's not 
just the quickest way to put people back to work but also to make our 
communities more livable, our families safer, healthier, and more 
economically secure. And it just might be the smoothest path to tax 
reform as well.

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