Mike Gallagher: “I want to talk today about infrastructure, and I start with the confession that I was lied to as a child. In fact, my…”

“I want to talk today about infrastructure, and I start with the confession that I was lied to as a child. In fact, my whole generation was lied to. We were told time and again by nearly every futuristic TV show or movie that by now we would all be traveling around on jetpacks and hoverboards. But we are still waiting. And while we wait, we have to grapple with the fact that we need to use roads wherever we are going and that our outdated infrastructure is nowhere near where it needs to be. {time} 1715 Few issues we debate here in Washington, D.C., impact the day-to-day lives of our constituents more directly than infrastructure. Yet, fixing our infrastructure has become a running joke, with seemingly every week derisively dubbed infrastructure week. It may be infrastructure week this week. We don't know. But infrastructure should not be an afterthought or a back-burner priority we deal with only when we have more money--which we don't--or when we are in a true infrastructure crisis. Even in December's $1.4 trillion spending deal, in which seemingly every lobbyist in D.C. got a Christmas present, infrastructure was largely ignored. Yet, infrastructure should not be impossible to tackle.…”