Source: United States Senator for Ohio Rob Portman
August 2, 2021 | Press Releases
WASHINGTON, DC – Today on the Senate floor, Senator Portman highlighted the landmark bipartisan Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act he helped craft, which represents a historic investment in roads and bridges, rail, transit, ports, airports, the electric grid, broadband, and much more. Portman discussed the need for Congress to make a smart investment in upgrading our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, as well as the broad support of the American people for the bipartisan approach he and his colleagues have taken in negotiating and building support for the bill. He highlighted how the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act will grow the economy, create jobs, and lower the national debt in the long-term, and how it will not add to the surging inflation our economy is currently experiencing.
Portman concluded by urging the Senate to support this critical investment and achieve a significant bipartisan victory on behalf of the American people.
A transcript of his remarks can be found below and a video can be found here.
“Chairman Carper, thank you. Thank you for managing this important legislation and all the work you have put into it. You know, I asked my team today, can you give me a sense of how much of this underlying legislation we’re talking about on the floor this week was already written. In other words, what did Senator Capito, Senator Carper, and others on the EPW Committee, as an example, already write with regard to the surface transportation reauthorization bill that we’re simply picking up in this legislation and moving forward to ensure it gets reauthorized, certainly before September 30 and we hope far before that. And it’s about half of the pages of the bill, is language that was written through the committee process here. Now some may be happy to hear that, some may be unhappy to hear that, but that’s the truth. And frankly, it made our job easier because a lot of the hard work was done.
“In the case of the legislation that Senator Carper and Senator Capito shepherded through their committee with the highways and bridges, it was a 20-0 vote as I recall, out of committee. Unanimous. And so we thought it was appropriate for us to not tell them how to do their job but to help them by picking up that legislation, and as they have improved that legislation, their underlying authorization legislation, to ensure that is included in the package. And I appreciate Senators Carper and Capito working with us on that even over the past few weeks.
“So yes, we have added more on top of it because we believe our nation needs a shot in the arm. We have enormous infrastructure needs. But without Senator Capito and Senator Carper’s involvement, 20-0 out of committee, we wouldn’t be where we are today. And that is the foundation upon which this is built. So I know that’s, again, not understood by everybody, but that’s the fact. And our nation’s infrastructure does need the help and this legislation, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, before us right now is an unprecedented investment. It’s historic. But it’s that because a historic investment that is needed. It’s important to note that we did so without raising taxes on the American people or causing further inflation in an already overheated economy.
“I heard some of my colleagues on my side say, ‘Gosh, I’d like to support you, but I’m worried about the spending and its impact on inflation.’ Well this is what the economists would call supply-side spending. This is long-term spending for capital assets that may last 30, 40, 50, 70 years. Think of a bridge. Or think of another infrastructure project, like a big water infrastructure project. So it’s a different kind of spending. It’s not going to be spent over the next year. In fact, very little, if any, will be spent in the next year. But it will be spent over time, over five, ten years for these kinds of projects.
“That’s the kind of money that goes into building infrastructure and building jobs. And therefore, again, on the supply side, rather than the demand side of the economy, as economists would say, it’s not stimulating the economy in that way. It’s growing the economy long-term. Most economists who have looked at this, including economists like Doug Holtz-Eakin, who used to be here at CBO, or economists like Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute or the Penn Wharton study out of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, they all say the same thing, which is this is actually a counter-inflationary kind of spending, and that’s important.
“I will say that this is needed because we are falling behind as a country and every state has its own needs here. I will tell you what my needs are in the state of Ohio, which is that we make a lot of stuff. So our factory workers who make tanks and make cars and make washing machines, we want to be sure that our infrastructure works to be able to get that to market. Sometimes that market is the United States, sometimes it’s overseas.
“Therefore our ports are important. But so is our rail. So are our highways. Our farmers, we’ve got a lot of farmers in Ohio. We plant crops. We want to make sure that those crops can get to the elevators, that the grain can get out. We have a lot of people in Ohio who live in cities and commute. And so the mom who is looking at her commute every day and saying, ‘Why do I get stuck in traffic at rush hour both ways and have to spend all this time in the car when I could be spending it with my kids,’ wouldn’t it be great to improve those highways and those bridges? To be able to reduce the amount of time that someone is stuck in a car?
“So this is about helping our country at a time when we need it. There is probably no better example of that than broadband, because think about the child in Appalachian Ohio who has no Wi-Fi service, like none. I’m not talking about slow Wi-Fi. I’m talking about no Wi-Fi. I look at my colleague from West Virginia and think of all the counties in West Virginia. They’re in the same shape as they are in eastern Ohio. We’re expanding broadband in an unprecedented way, the deployment of broadband into the rural community, but also access in the more suburban and urban communities. That’s really important because that child now can be able to do the school work at home. And during the pandemic, of course, this has been a huge issue. But it’s an issue every day. Rather than having to drive with her mom to the local library, which some girl might have to do now in Appalachia to find a Wi-Fi signal, she can actually get it at home because of this deployment that we’ve provided in here, which is unprecedented.
“So all of this is in this. It’s all part of it. It’s important. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given our nation a report card every year. Our report card right now is a C-. We get a C-. Now, I did get a couple of C’s in high school and college, so I don’t think C’s are always terrible, but I don’t want our infrastructure to get a C, much less a C-.
“They estimate that somewhere in America there’s a water break every two minutes. Water infrastructure is a part of this. They also estimate that 43 percent of our public roads are in poor or mediocre condition. This hasn’t improved in years. We’re now listed 13th in the world for infrastructure in the most recent rankings by the World Economic Forum. Every year, they look at all these countries around the world and say, where do you rank? And the U.S. is right up there. I think Singapore and the U.S. are some of those competitive countries in the world in terms of all the analysis they do. But not on infrastructure. On infrastructure, it drags us down. Because, frankly, we haven’t invested, as other countries have.
“The number out there that people use is that China spends four times more than we do as a percent of their economy on infrastructure. I think it’s actually higher than that from the numbers I’ve seen. But let’s say it is four times more. China gets it. They know infrastructure is important for economic growth. I talked earlier about how it makes the economy more efficient and therefore more productive, and therefore you have more tax revenue generated. They get that. We’ve allowed our infrastructure to get to the point where we are not competitive as a country with so many others. Not just developed countries either.
“We’ve cut back funding over the years and so it’s probably no wonder this has happened. The Aspen Economic Strategy Group calculated that as of 2017, our total spending on infrastructure across the public and private sectors hit its lowest point since at least 1947. So, relatively speaking, we have less expenditures on infrastructure. And this lack of investment has real impact. Historian Henry Petroski estimates that the delays caused by traffic congestion alone cost our economy more than $120 billion every year. So I talked about the mom who’s commuting and not being able to spend more time with her kids because she’s sitting in her car – $120 billion a year is the economic impact. That’s important too. One 2017 study by the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated there is a total infrastructure gap of more than $2 trillion that we need to address by 2025, otherwise we could lose nearly $4 trillion in GDP – economic growth – that we otherwise would have produced as a country.
“Now, those are big numbers. Those are big numbers. These are the engineers that say we have a gap of $2 trillion we need to address by 2025. Ours is $550 billion over the next five years. Historic levels. Some would say it may not be enough. I think it is. And you’ll hear a lot about this this week as all the different places where these infrastructure investments are made. But others would say we need to do even more.
“You can see that there is a need for renewed infrastructure. Let me give you a really specific example, and it’s one reason I’m interested in this project, honestly. For, gosh, 25 years now we’ve been talking about fixing our bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s called the Brent Spence Bridge. It’s where I-75 and I-71 come together. So think about all the commercial traffic. Actually 3 percent of the nation’s commerce goes over this one bridge every year.
“It’s a huge economic issue for us in greater Cincinnati. And there’s congestion there every day. It’s a bottleneck. The bridge is busy. In fact, it’s carrying twice the number of cars that it was built to carry already. There are no shoulders anymore on it because they’ve tried to expand the lanes as much as they can. We recently had two trucks crash there, partly because there’s no shoulder and the safety problems are huge on that bridge. It took the bridge out for a couple of months, huge economic impact, huge economic impact.
“This bridge, again for 25 years, people have said we’ve got to replace this bridge. It’s not safe, it’s not big enough. It doesn’t connect 71 and 75 in the way that it should for our commercial activities. It’s a bridge that has been deemed by the U.S. Department of Transportation as functionally obsolete. That sounds pretty dramatic. Functionally obsolete. Unfortunately, again, these accidents continue to happen because it’s not safe. You got 160,000 vehicles on it rather than the 80,000 per day it was designed to accommodate. It needs to be fixed, but it’s really expensive. And the local community, the states, just simply can’t do it alone.
“There are critical pieces of infrastructure like the Brent Spence Bridge in states all over our country, from roads to railroads to ports to broadband networks, that all need upgrades to stay competitive in this global economy. It’s no surprise, then, that infrastructure is an area where the American people really do want action. They get it on this one. They want us to come together as Republicans and Democrats and fix this problem. There’s a recent poll by CNBC saying 87 percent of Americans think it’s important we invest in improving our crumbling roads and bridges. There’s another poll that came out a couple of months later, a very recent poll saying – again this is a CBS poll – 87 percent of Americans support more federal spending on repairing roads and bridges. Two polls, two months apart, same number. Eighty-seven percent. Eighty-seven percent of the American people don’t agree on anything, but they do agree on this, which is, let’s fix our infrastructure.
“Let’s do what presidents in modern times have all said we ought to do – President Bush, President Obama, President Trump, President Biden. President Trump had a proposal for $1.5 trillion. Ours is $550 billion dollars. President Trump had a proposal for $1.5 trillion, ours is $550 billion. President Trump is a developer, a builder. He understood the need for infrastructure investment, but, frankly, Congress didn’t work with him to get that done. There were also issues about how that was to be paid for. But I commend President Trump for raising that issue. He ought to be given some credit, because we might not be talking about it if he hadn’t continued to say we need to invest big time in infrastructure. Then President Biden and his campaign said the same thing. And when he took office, he said the same thing – we need to do an infrastructure plan.
“His original plan wasn’t one that Republicans could support because it had huge tax increases in it and it had a lot of infrastructure that wasn’t core infrastructure. And that’s why we came together as a bipartisan group. Senator Capito is here – she worked with the White House on this to try to come up with a way to move forward. And again, that helped create the foundation for what we’ve done here. But the point is Republican and Democrat alike over the years have said the same thing, which is: It’s time. Let’s fix this infrastructure.
“Finally we’re giving the infrastructure the help it needs and deserves and giving the American people, more importantly, the infrastructure that they want. And it’s a good investment. One 2014 University of Maryland study found you can generate a return as much as three dollars for the economy for each dollar you invest in infrastructure – one dollar in, three dollars out. It’s smart spending if done correctly. That explains why, again, President Trump put forward the $1.5 trillion package, why President Biden put together a package, why Democrats and Republicans alike up here on Capitol Hill talked about infrastructure for years.
“American workers need infrastructure. They don’t need new taxes. That’s why in this proposal, again, we say let’s take the taxes out, let’s pull the core infrastructure out so it’s more focused on what’s really needed, and let’s do it on a bipartisan basis. And that’s what we do in this proposal.
“The pro-growth policies put in place by Congress through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was very good for our economy in every respect. Wages went up, the lowest poverty rate since we started keeping track of it in the 1950s, a lot of very good things. Unemployment at historic lows for many groups, including Blacks, Hispanics. Overall a 50-year low in unemployment. We got to be sure we’re not raising taxes now because we went into this pandemic with a strong economy, we’ve got to come out of it with a strong economy. But infrastructure is something that we should do without raising taxes.
“There was a lot of discussion after President Biden talked about infrastructure as to whether it could be partisan or bipartisan. And there were some people saying let’s put it in what’s called reconciliation where you don’t need a single Republican vote. I applaud President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in this chamber for saying, ‘You know what? This is one where we ought to be able to get together.’ If you can’t get together on a bipartisan basis on infrastructure, where can you? So that’s why we were able to figure out a way, again, without raising taxes, focusing on core infrastructure, to ensure that the critical infrastructure we rely on every day, our roads, our bridge, our railways, our electrical grids, our water supplies, our broadband and more, will get fixed.
“Again, 87 percent of the American people are looking to us to do that. It’s no wonder. Go home. Talk to the people you represent in your state and they’ll tell you this is one where we come together. We need to deal with the infrastructure challenges we face and the digital divide that is out there. What this does not include is a grab bag of social spending priorities that the Democrats want to include in the other bill they’re talking about, which is the $3.5 trillion spending proposal they unveiled earlier this month. And that’s an important point that my colleagues should not miss. The president has said that the $3.5 trillion package, the so-called reconciliation package, will not include more core infrastructure funding. In other words, the president has said, ‘I proposed $2.65 trillion. The bipartisan group pulled out core infrastructure and said it’s going to be $550 billion. I’m now not going to put the additional amount I wanted into reconciliation.’ Simply put, Republicans and Democrats alike coming together to focus on the core part of this without taxes has ensured that a lot more is not going to be spent, both on core infrastructure and on so-called social infrastructure with huge tax increases in another package. So this is the best thing for the American economy, by far, to have a bipartisan proposal.
“The president has said that we’re not going to double-dip. In other words, infrastructure won’t be in the next package. He said that privately. He said that publicly. And I believe he’ll keep his word on that. Certainly those of us who are involved in this will ensure that that’s not a part of the agreement that is violated.
“So we’re seeing these studies come out that show that this is the right approach for the economy. We talked about the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business study that says our proposal will actually increase the economy, raise wages for workers, and actually lower our national debt over the longer term, again because of the feedback loop we talked about earlier. It makes the economy more efficient, more productive, and grows the economy, more revenue would be coming into the economy. And again, we do so without raising taxes.
“A Democratic economist, Larry Summers, and many on the Republican side of the aisle had been warning for months about inflation. Again, as I said earlier, this is counter-inflationary. The bottom line is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will provide an historic investment in hard infrastructure with input from a bipartisan group of senators while avoiding the tax hikes and the reckless spending proposed by the Biden administration, and importantly for the sake of future bipartisanship here in Congress, this is an infrastructure plan that allows us to avoid the repeat of the COVID-19 $1.9 trillion spending bill that passed under the partisan process called reconciliation. It demonstrates to the American people that in fact we can figure out how to work together to get big things done.
“President Biden said he wanted to work in a bipartisan way. Well, this is a great example of it. It’s a genuine effort on behalf of Republicans and Democrats to find common ground and move our country forward. I’m committed to working with my colleagues here in the Senate to see this legislation through to the end. We’ve come a long way. And I believe we’re close to achieving a historic victory for the American people. I encourage all my colleagues to join us in supporting this Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act so that we can truly make an important bipartisan investment in the next generations of Americans.”
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