Political Quotes

“it is always a little bit frustrating when we come to a vote on a bill like this, that we wonder whether people who are going to be voting on this, or their staff, are paying attention. Well, I guess, without a rollcall or anything like that, we just rely on the fact that those wonderful staff people have their eyes focused on this chart and what the impact is of this legislation. Now, this highway trust fund was established in, I believe, 1956, and what we have done is we have added up cumulatively all the money that has ever been collected from taxpayers in highway taxes to pay for roads. We added it all up from 1956 to 1996. The total amount of money collected in highway gasoline taxes to pay for highways totals $214 billion. Now, we added to that that interest that we owe from just the highway section, and that adds up to $21 billion, for a grand total, and think of this as some kind of a telethon, a grand total of what we have raised since 1956, of $235 billion from our taxpayers in fuel tax to fix our roads. Let me stress that number again: $235 billion total collected, plus interest. Trust fund spending has been $228 billion. In other words, my colleagues, we collected $214 billion in gas tax money to fix the roads.”