Free Up America's Resources

Floor Speech

Mr. MURPHY of Pennsylvania. The President's jobs bill has a surprising number in it for rebuilding our infrastructure. Most Americans would be surprised that that number is only $27 billion. Divide that between States, and you barely have enough to put some tar and chips on the roads. And yet, as the President is out touting this jobs bill and talking about our crumbling infrastructure, it just isn't going to do the job.

How about this number? $129 billion to build roads and buildings and water projects? Unfortunately, that number is not being spent in the United States; rather, that $129 billion is the number that Americans pay in foreign aid to OPEC countries to build their roads, their palaces, their buildings.

Now, unfortunately, that money goes to more than just their infrastructure. It also goes to countries like Iran that fund their nuclear weapons programs threatening Israel and the neighboring countries. It goes to Iran to fund their assassination attempts against Saudi Ambassadors. Iran used it to fund terrorist weapons and IEDs to kill our soldiers. We pay for both sides in the war on terror, and much of that comes through buying foreign energy.

In the meantime, our roads are crumbling, our bridges are rusting and corroding, our locks and dams are decaying, our water and sewer pipe lines are collapsing.

And listen to the cost. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the numbers are staggering: $935 billion are needed to fix our roads and bridges; $87 billion for aviation; $12.5 billion for our locks and dams; $255 billion to fix our drinking water; $75 billion for energy infrastructure; $50 billion for inland waterways; $50 billion for levees; $265 billion for transit. Where is the money going to come from?

What is being proposed are long-term and permanent taxes, about 30 years worth of more debt and borrowed money from China for a small $27 billion to do this. It's not going to do the job, and raising taxes and creating warfare between classes is not going to do it.

Here's what can do it. We have, off of our coast, about 85 to 115 billion barrels of oil, trillion cubic feet of natural gas, trillions. We have massive amounts of money off our coast. Unfortunately, the administration says no, we can't use our money. We have to continue to borrow from China, increase debt or raise taxes. Those approaches to rebuilding America will not do.

What we need to do is free up American resources, use our resources, use our funding to rebuild America. And think what comes out of this. From the royalties, the leases, and from the income taxes that come from hiring, yes, millions of people to involve with civil engineers and operating engineers, laborers, architects, steamfitters, welders, people who work on the rigs, you create $2 trillion to $3 trillion worth of revenue over the next 20 years.

What we need to be doing is making a commitment to invest that money in American infrastructure, American resources, American funds for American infrastructure.

Think of what this also does for our manufacturing. When you create that kind of demand for steel and concrete and that kind of demand for equipment to be purchased over a long time, this is a real jobs plan. We don't need to be going back hat in hand to other countries and saying, please let us borrow more from you. We don't need to be having class warfare. We don't need to be saying, let's just attack people who make a certain amount of money. We don't need to be saying, let's take all the revenue that comes from taxing these corporate jets for 10 years and use it to fund the government for a lousy hour and 45 minutes. Those may be great talking points, but they are not a jobs plan.

America wants to work and America wants us to use our resources. America wants to stop funding both sides in the war on terror. We can do this. And it doesn't take some sort of super plan to do this. It just says, America has all the resources.

I call upon my colleagues to continue to push for ways that we can free up American resources, stop saying no to American jobs, stop simply using political rhetoric to block these things, but really create this mechanism by which we can pay for rebuilding America.

We can do it. We have the resources to do it. We have to have the way and we have to have the will.

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