[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11614-11615]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           HIGHWAY TRUST FUND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Wisconsin (Mr. Ribble) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. RIBBLE. Mr. Speaker, this afternoon, this body is going to come 
together and in bipartisan fashion--I think that is normally a good 
thing, in bipartisan fashion--be able to applaud themselves for fixing 
the highway trust fund. Like the proverbial magician that takes the 
shiny object in one hand to distract you, they will, with sleight of 
hand, with the other hand borrow $8.1 billion when the American people 
aren't watching.

[[Page 11615]]

  I want to refer you to the chart on my left. You will see three 
lines. I want to talk about the bottom two first.
  The very bottom line is the revenue line. That is the amount of money 
we receive from excise taxes and gasoline taxes to pay for roads and 
bridges and infrastructure. The red line above it is the expenditures. 
That is the money that we are spending. The difference between the two 
is the deficit. That is the borrowed money. I will show you where it 
is.
  For decades--for decades--we have been adding red ink to the American 
people's debt. We have been borrowing billions of dollars annually each 
year to spend on our infrastructure rather than telling the American 
people the truth: that if we believe as Members of Congress and this 
body that roads and bridges and airports are important enough to buy, 
they are important enough to pay for. But we don't want to do that. We 
don't want to tell the American people we are going to raise taxes.
  But I want you to know that this afternoon when we borrow $1.8 
billion to build roads and bridges, we are going to raise taxes. Here 
is what I mean. We are going to raise taxes on kids, on our children, 
on my 11-year-old grandson. Do you want to know why? Because we don't 
want to tell them, we don't want to tell adults today that they have to 
pay for the roads and bridges that they buy today. What we would rather 
do is say you can have these things for free. We are going to wave the 
shiny magic object here. We are going to borrow money while telling the 
American people it is paid for, and then we are going to ask our 
children when they grow up to buy our roads and bridges when the bill 
comes due.
  We are perfectly fine on raising taxes on kids, raising taxes on 
children. Do you want to know why? Because they can't vote. So let's 
tell them they have got to pay for this stuff rather than us paying for 
this stuff. Remember, all deficit spending is nothing more than future 
taxation.
  What is the top line here, the hash line? Back in 1992, the last time 
that we raised the national gas tax, Congress, before I came here and 
before many of my colleagues came here, decided not to index the gas 
tax to inflation. So our purchasing power is disappearing because we 
have left it where it is.
  Now, I am going to use a green pen here. All that green is lost 
opportunity.
  I don't know how many of you have flown into LaGuardia, JFK, O'Hare, 
these international airports. They are the international gateway to the 
United States economy, and they are also an international embarrassment 
on a global scale.
  We continue to let these places degrade and fall apart, and yet none 
of us in our own spending would do that in our homes. If the roof 
leaks, we fix it. If the House needs painting, we paint it. We take 
care of these things and maintain them because they are our assets. 
They are what we are passing on to the next generation. We have lost 
all this opportunity.
  What I would much rather see is either we are honest with the 
American people, Mr. Speaker, and say, if it is worth buying and worth 
doing, we should pay for it, and then raise the taxes necessary to do 
that, like Ronald Reagan did, like George Bush did, like Dwight 
Eisenhower did--all Republican Presidents. They said it is worth paying 
for. Let's not burden our children. Let's not tax them. If it is worth 
doing that, we should do that.
  If it is not worth doing that, we should bring our expenditures down 
to the revenue level and not spend the money in the first place so that 
we are sending a clear message back to each of the States that are 
getting Federal largess on highways and roads that we are not going to 
do that and that you need to raise your taxes to cover the gap.
  Both of those ideas would be better than what we are doing right now, 
which is nothing but a magic trick on children, and we ought to stop 
it.

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