Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman. At the outset, my colleague from California, a great leader on this issue, had said that it was 12 years ago when we had a budgetary surplus of $258 billion. How was that created? It was created by having created 22 million private sector jobs in the previous 8 years, telling us that the best tax policy is bringing back lost taxpayers to productivity so that they're contributing to the Federal Treasury. That allows us to make the investments into our economy and, as my colleague from New York said, to nation-build right here at home. One thing that historically here Democrats and Republicans were able to agree on is infrastructure investment. I think the need is extraordinarily great right now, and we should do an infrastructure bill that is robust and aspirational in addressing the infrastructure needs and the decaying state of our infrastructure as soon as possible. A final thought on this. There's a report out of the State of Nevada that says if you defer infrastructure repair for 2 years, you increase the cost of making that repair by a factor of five. So a $5 million bridge repair that could be done today, 2 years from now will cost you $25 million. A $1 million road repair today will cost you $5 million 2 years from now. So we need to get to work, and much work needs to be done.”