John Yarmuth: “There's another element to the philosophy that I think we need to talk about now, and I see it in discussions that we…”

“There's another element to the philosophy that I think we need to talk about now, and I see it in discussions that we have in our caucus meetings, and I think it's a growing realization that we have to embrace as a philosophy in this body that we can't think just to the next election cycle. We have to start thinking very long-term, and we have to start thinking about investment and investments that will pay off over the long run but will not get us any immediate gratification or recognition so that we can get votes at the next election. And you mentioned health care, and that's certainly an area in which we have to start investing because every dollar we spend on early childhood health care we know pays off 10, 20 times down the road. You can't see it today. The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, won't score it and say, okay, you can take credit for that, but we know that it happens. If children are tended to early on, preventive care, diagnostic work, we catch a hearing problem, a sight problem, you catch them before they get obese, we know how much that returns in savings down the road. The same way with infrastructure. We've neglected infrastructure in this country for far too long. We know we have to make investments in infrastructure, but those are the types of investments that do pay off. It's not like Iraq where every dollar, once you shoot a bullet, once you shoot a rocket, that's money gone. There's no investment there, no return on investment.”