Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman and ranking member for their hard work on this bill. Madam Chairman, my amendment is simple. It requires the Department of Transportation to send an annual report to Congress on how much funding each State has received from the highway trust fund and how much each State has contributed to the highway trust fund both directly through the gas tax and related fees and taxes and indirectly through transfers from the general fund. To understand why this is important, let's step back and ask how it is that we actually decide how much transportation money is spent in each State. The bulk of this funding takes the form of formula grants to States with overall allocations often set by whatever was done in previous years. This may tell us a lot about congressional politics in years gone by, but it tells us very little about good public policy. All of this serves as a smokescreen which begs the real question: How do we actually allocate our highway spending? Now, I am a scientist, and I look at the facts. As far as I can tell, here are the facts. This is a plot here that shows the annual per capita spending from the highway trust fund plotted against the number of U.S. Senators per 10 million people, which I will explain in a moment. Madam Chair, I include this in the Record.…”