Roy Blunt: “I want to talk also about infrastructure and associate myself with the interest that the country has in infrastructure.…”

“I want to talk also about infrastructure and associate myself with the interest that the country has in infrastructure. In fact, one of the things that the government has done the longest has been roads and bridges and canals. I think, initially, the term ``internal improvements'' was, in the early 19th century, what they would have talked about when they talked about what we began to talk about later as ``infrastructure.'' During almost the entire history of the country, there was an understanding of what ``infrastructure'' meant in America. Infrastructure is pretty popular, and infrastructure is definitely something that you generally can't do for yourself. You can't, on your own, provide the waterline that connects your house to the next house. On your own, you can't provide the road that gets you from home to work. On your own, you can't do a lot of things that we did early on and up until right now and call them infrastructure. Normally, they were seen as things like roads and bridges and dams--big projects that sometimes crossed State lines--or big projects that sometimes were just too big for a State or a town to handle, like water systems that needed to be improved.…”