Let me give you an example. The American Public Works Association--these are people with the sanitation systems, the water systems and the like--estimate that 25 percent of all of the fresh-treated water in our municipal water systems is lost to leakage, and they estimate, together with the EPA, that we need to spend over $300 billion immediately to deal with sanitation systems in the United States that are inadequate and $335 billion in drinking water so that we have clean, available drinking water. One more point here: for every billion dollars we spend, you put 28,000 people to work immediately. Those are the engineers, the draftsmen, the architects, the men and women who are operating the equipment, who are back-filling the ditches, laying the pipe. And if we use another strategy that we've developed on the Democratic side called Make It in America--if you use our taxpayer money to buy American-made equipment--then in your district, the steel mills begin once again to produce American-made steel, and all of the pipe and other equipment that's needed can be produced in America, using our money. I love your example of the 1 percent. There have been Democratic proposals--and in fact, the President talked about it here in his state of the Union--about creating an infrastructure bank.…
On the recordApril 23, 2013
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