From the White House:
Since our earliest days, the American transportation system has comprised our economic backbone — part of what’s made us great as a nation.
But right now, there’s a big problem with our roads and bridges: Over the years, we’ve invested in them less and less. They haven’t kept up with the needs and demands of our growing economy.
That’s why the President has been clear: Investing in our infrastructure is a top priority, and it’s why he’s put out a long-term plan that shows we can invest in our infrastructure and pay for it in part by closing unfair tax loopholes and making commonsense reforms to our tax system.
With funding for surface transportation running out, and hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, we simply can’t afford to stop investing in our transportation.
65% of America’s roads are already in less than good condition, and a quarter of our bridges require significant repair or can’t handle today’s traffic.
The President has a plan to fix our nation’s infrastructure for the long run — making targeted investments in the short term and laying the groundwork for increased efficiency down the road. But in the meantime, he’s calling on Congress to avoid a lapse in funding of the Highway Trust Fund.
His long-term plan to invest in rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure would (among other things):
– Invest $302 billion over four years into our highways, railroads, and transit systems
– Provide certainty that cities, states, and investors need to break ground on major projects
– Build a world-class freight network that gets our products out to overseas markets
White House Blog: The President Speaks on the Importance of Our Nation’s Infrastructure
[Tuesday] morning, President Obama took a quick trip across the Potomac to visit the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, a facility in McLean, Virginia that focuses on highway technologies that help make driving safer and smarter.
In the President’s remarks, he talked about the importance of investing in new infrastructure technologies and renewing the Highway Trust Fund, as well as Congress’s continued inaction on important policies that would positively benefit millions of Americans.
Transcript. Selected quotes:
We know that in a 21st century economy businesses will set up shop wherever they find the best roads and bridges, and the fastest rail and Internet, the smartest airports, the smartest power grids. First-class infrastructure attracts first-class jobs. And right now, our investments in transportation are lagging the rest of the world.
If Washington were working the way it’s supposed to, Congress would be fixing that. We’d be investing in the things that help America bring more good jobs to our shores. Instead, here’s what’s going on in Washington. There’s something called the Highway Trust Fund — I suspect this crew is familiar with it. It helps states support transportation projects. If Congress fails to fund it, it runs out of money. That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk, including more than 17,000 right here in Virginia. More than 100,000 active projects across the country — projects where workers as we speak are paving roads and rebuilding bridges and modernizing our transit systems — those projects would be slowed or stopped. And some states have already had to put some projects on hold because they don’t trust Congress to get its act together. So remember that the next time you see a job site sitting idle.
Now, the good news is there are bipartisan bills in both the House and the Senate that would help with a short-term fix. And I support that. At the very least, Congress should be keeping people on the job who are already there right now. But all this does is set us up for the same crisis a few months from now.
So Congress shouldn’t pat itself on the back for averting disaster for a few months, kicking the can down the road for a few months, careening from crisis to crisis when it comes to something as basic as our infrastructure. Instead of barely paying our bills in the present, we should be investing in the future. We should have a plan for how we’re going to make sure that our roads, our bridges, our airports, our power grid, our water systems — how all those things are going to be funded, and do it in a responsible way so that people can start planning. That also means we can save more money — because we’re not doing it in stopgap measures.
So far, House Republicans have refused to act on this idea — and they haven’t presented their own idea. And I think that’s wrong. We shouldn’t be protecting tax loopholes for a few companies that shift massive profits overseas; we should be creating jobs rebuilding the roads and bridges that help every business right here in the United States. That is a question of priorities. And what I keep hearing from folks all across the country is that if Congress would just shift its priorities a little closer to working Americans’ priorities, we could help a lot of families right now.
This is not an abstract issue. And it shouldn’t be even a partisan issue. Republicans, Democrats, independents — everybody uses our roads. …
But the American people have to demand that folks in Washington do their job. Do something: That’s my big motto for Congress right now. Just do something. And if they don’t like the transportation plan that I put forward, at least come up with your own plan. And then we can compromise. But don’t just sit there and do nothing. We don’t have time. America is on the move.
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