Highway Trust Fund Extension--Continued

Floor Speech

HIGHWAY TRUST FUND EXTENSION--Continued -- (Senate - July 30, 2009)

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Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I rise and urge strong bipartisan support for the Vitter amendment. The Vitter amendment simply moves $7 billion from the stimulus--less than 1 percent of the original stimulus program--to backfill and take care of the need in the highway trust fund.

This is important to do for two reasons.

First of all, we need to stop the reckless borrowing. We are borrowing ourselves into oblivion. We are borrowing our children into poor economic times. We need to reverse that trend. The underlying bill fixes the hole in the highway trust fund simply by racking up more debt, and that is why there is a budget point of order against it. So we need to stop this never-ending upward spiral of borrowing.

No. 2, by doing this, we can focus a little bit of the stimulus on something I believe we all think it always should have been focused on: infrastructure spending and spending now versus later. This will move the $7 billion toward roadway spending now, which is effective stimulus.

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Mr. VITTER. Madam President, this is about a budget point of order. That
means the bill, since it was not amended as I would have liked, is contrary to the Budget Act. It has more outlays this year. It also requires us to rack up more debt, borrow more money. In the face of $2 trillion of new debt this year, doubling that in 5 years, and tripling it in 10, this is a critical vote. Either you vote yes and say let's continue to go down that path or you vote no and say we need to change course about debt.

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