Infrastructure

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, on one final matter, $865,000 dollars-- $865,000. That is roughly the cost of every new job the White House claims their so-called American Jobs Plan would create, $865,000.

This is how the math shakes out if you use the most favorable estimates that the Biden administration itself prefers. Figures reported by Bloomberg News come out to about $865,000 per job. Other analyses have found numbers actually north of $860,000.

Here is where the number comes from. The White House has tried to claim their spending plan would create 19 million jobs over the next decade. That is completely false. The Washington Post Fact Checker gave Democrats multiple Pinocchios for this false claim.

Nineteen million jobs is one estimate of the total number of jobs the entire country would add over the next decade, from all sources--all sources. The same estimate says we are on track to add more than 16 million of those same jobs without the bill.

So this proposal to tax, borrow, and spend $2.25 trillion would only create 2.6 million new jobs. And remember, these are the rosiest-- rosiest--best-case estimates that the White House itself has been pushing.

Now, I know a whole lot of Kentucky entrepreneurs and business owners who create more than one job if we gave them $865,000 to invest and expand.

Mr. President, I am sure you represent a lot of smart people who could turn an $865,000 investment into more than just one job.

The awful arithmetic just underscores how disappointing the proposal is. When the American people think of infrastructure, they think of honest-to-goodness public works projects that truly invest in the public good--things that build our Nation's backbone. And when Congress tackles real, tangible infrastructure issues in a smart fashion, there is big, broad bipartisan support.

The 2015 highway bill, the FAST Act, was a huge bipartisan lift that Senator Inhofe and former Senator Boxer hammered out together. I was proud to play a major role in that accomplishment myself. It was the first full 5-year highway bill that Congress had passed in 20 years. And it won 83 votes in the Senate and about the same percentage over in the House.

Even more recently, in 2018, the Senate passed America's Water Infrastructure Act, 99 to 1--the new investments in water infrastructure across the country to create jobs, grow the economy, and ensure that American families get the safe drinking water they deserve, 99 to 1.

Just last year, another water infrastructure package came out of the EPW Committee unanimously and cleared the Senate in a package that passed 92 to 6.

So there is bipartisan appetite for smart infrastructure bills that are built the right way. The Senate has proven that over and over again. There isn't much appetite for using the word ``infrastructure'' to justify a colossal--colossal--multitrillion-dollar slush fund for unrelated bad ideas.

A Harvard economist and infrastructure expert says, and listen to this, ``It does a bit of violence to the English language'' to call this an infrastructure proposal. That is a Harvard economist.

An expert at Columbia says big chunks of the proposal are ``really social spending, not productivity-enhancing infrastructure of any kind.''

One political analyst wrote:

[T]he plan . . . reads like a liberal wish list for everything the left has wanted.

Less than 6--6 percent of the proposal goes to roads and bridges, less than 6 percent. It would send more money to just electric cars than it would spend on our Nation's roads, bridges, ports, airports, and waterways combined.

And while this proposal chases every green fad, it would also slam our economy with the largest tax hikes in a generation.

Experts at the Wharton School of Business have projected the plan would decrease GDP, decrease capital stock, and reduce workers' hourly wages 10, 20, and 30 years down the road.

Economists at Rice University recently looked at a similar package of Democratic tax hikes and found it would lead to a loss of a million jobs here in our country over just 2 years. Exactly when American workers are counting on an economic recovery, Democrats want to slap the economy with a massive set of tax increases.

So look, this noninfrastructure ``infrastructure'' plan is cut from the same cloth as the Democrats' nonvoting rights ``voting rights'' bill.

Both these subjects are ripe for bipartisan work. Both are subjects the Senate has addressed in the past with thoughtful compromises that have earned broad support. And both are issues where the American people will reject a far-left approach that makes their lives worse.

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