Political Quotes

“The gentleman is absolutely correct. There are lots of ways of going about this. Ronald Reagan in 1982 understood that the gas tax, a user fee, could be used to help the country, which at that point was in a serious economic recession. Ronald Reagan signed into law a nickel-a-gallon increase in the gas tax that helped spur economic development activity. If you don't want to raise a tax, there are unnecessary tax benefits that are flowing, for instance, to the largest oil companies that no longer need these tax breaks. In fact, George Bush the younger was famously quoted as saying when oil prices got to $50 a barrel that oil companies didn't need incentives to drill for the most profitable commodity on the face of the planet. Where we've watched it go to $100 a barrel or more, we could completely capitalize the infrastructure bank the gentleman talked about just by unnecessary tax benefits to oil companies, which the majority of the American public would approve in a heartbeat. There are also the expiring tax provisions on the wealthiest of Americans where just half of that would enable us to fully fund the transportation gap over the next 10 years. I have bipartisan legislation that would deal with a water trust fund that would leverage close to a trillion dollars because of what the gentleman said--that there are other funds flowing for infrastructure like that, a trillion dollars of development over the next 20 years.…”