John Yarmuth: “I appreciate him mentioning the field of education because you can have, as I mentioned earlier, two forms of…”

“I appreciate him mentioning the field of education because you can have, as I mentioned earlier, two forms of expenditure in government. You can have expenditures that are nonproductive, and one of those, I think, is the war in Iraq. Interest on the debt is another one, because there is no long-term payback to those expenditures. Education, investment in infrastructure, as Mr. Walz was discussing, those are the types of things that over the long run do produce increased revenues for society productivity, and they are the type of investments we need to be focusing on. And when we look at this budget, the field of education, and I'm on the Education and Labor Committee and we are dealing with trying to decide whether to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act which is already $55 billion below its authorized levels in funding. And the President, once again, has no increases in funding for education in this budget, which means we fall further and further behind. So while he called his act No Child Left Behind, where, in fact, we are leaving more and more children behind because we are not meeting our obligations to make the kind of investments in people and in an infrastructure that really will pay off over the long run.”