Kerry: Infrastructure Bank A Bi-Partisan Effort to Create Jobs The President’s proposal to create a national infrastructure bank is based upon the bipartisan BUILD Act Senator Kerry introduced last spring
PoliticalNews.me - Nov 03,2011 - Kerry: Infrastructure Bank A Bi-Partisan Effort to Create Jobs
WASHINGTON– Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.)spoke on the Senate floor in support of the Rebuild America Jobs Act. The President’s proposal to create a national infrastructure bank is based upon the bipartisan BUILD Act Senator Kerry introduced last spring with Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.)
“Everyone here knows that we're not currently pursuing a set of projects that are calculated to make America more competitive. We're busy living off the assets that were created by the generations that preceded us,” Senator Kerry said. “I am convinced that if we put this infrastructure bank together, we will find all of a sudden that the United States is going to attract capital, create jobs, modernize our economy and have benefits that spill out all across our nation. And I hope our colleagues will get rid of the politics and embrace this idea which is long overdue.”
Senator Kerry’s full statement, as delivered, is below:
Mr. President, we are currently, I believe, debating the motion to proceed to go to the energy, water, et cetera package, I think, and included in that is the proposal of the President that he has sent up here asking the Senate to vote on the question of an infrastructure bank. There was a prior vote, I believe, in the Senate on that in the context of the Jobs Act, which we all know failed at that time, and there are some signs that this may wind up being a partisan effort here, but I hope colleagues will stop and think very, very carefully about the infrastructure bank proposal and what it represents to our country, and whether or not we can get it over the hurdle at this moment, I don't know, but it is an idea whose time has come, and I'm confident that in the next week or months, hopefully, the Senate will embrace this concept, and the reason for doing so is really very simple. Colleagues on both sides of the aisle are increasingly reminded when they go home, as well as familiar here - just with the general dialogue about where we're going in our country – are increasingly aware of the enormous infrastructure deficit that we face in the country as a whole.
And so I want colleagues to stop and think hard about a simple question: how are we going to build America? How are we going to build America going forward so that we can do what our parents and our grandparents did for us, which is provide us with basic infrastructure of a nation that has been able to allow people to move easily from home to work, to places of commerce across the country, an interstate highway system, all of our airports, our train stations, all of the assets that provide for the strength of our nation and for the kind of communities that we live in.
