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SUPPORT FOR THE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT AND JOBS ACT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Kansas (Ms. Davids) for 5 minutes.
Ms. DAVIDS of Kansas. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It would bring billions of dollars to much-needed infrastructure projects in my home State, from bridges to broadband, and it does so without raising taxes on people who make less than $400,000 a year.
As I have said before, this bill is not absolutely perfect, but it is absolutely necessary. It is a product of compromise. That is, at the end of the day, what legislating often means.
In the district I represent, this bill has received a remarkable amount of support, including everyone from labor unions to local chambers of commerce to climate groups. They are joined by national organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and hundreds of labor and trade associations.
I urge my colleagues to listen to their communities who are calling for these investments and not to give in to the Washington machine that so often turns shared bipartisan goals into political games.
This bill reminds me of the last time that we saw this level of investment in America's infrastructure, when President Eisenhower, who was from Kansas, recognized an opportunity to rebuild the economy and create jobs through infrastructure. We were then, as we are today, in a challenging time defined by a national crisis and economic difficulty.
I believe, as Eisenhower did, that infrastructure is key to building long-term economic growth. At the end of the day, infrastructure is made up of many everyday systems that connect us to one another and broaden opportunities.
If we don't invest in the health of those systems, whether it is the safety of highways like U.S. 69 in the district I get to represent, or access to high-speed internet in areas across Kansas, both urban and rural, we pay the price, and it is not just in the ways we might think.
We feel the impact of past decades of underinvestment in infrastructure, in our economy, in our educational systems, in the health of our kids, and in the health of our planet.
That is why this bill is absolutely necessary because infrastructure touches so many parts of our lives and the lives of our future generations. This bipartisan bill boosts American competitiveness, tackles climate change, and advances equity now and into the future. It is projected to create 2 million jobs per year for the next decade, with fair wage requirements written into the text.
Independent studies have shown that the investments in this bill will have multiplier effects on the economy, improving productivity and boosting economic output without increasing inflation. This infrastructure bill is large, but so is the problem.
There are immediate infrastructure needs, from roads and bridges to public transit and rail, waterways, and airports. All of these need attention. This bill will undoubtedly bring the Federal funding needed to address those issues here in the near term, and it makes significant progress toward longer-term goals, like replacing lead pipes so that every child can have access to clean drinking water or promoting Buy American provisions that create good-paying jobs for both construction and production of materials or modernizing our electric grid to prevent blackouts, like the ones we saw in Kansas and those we saw in Texas earlier this year.
For people sitting in traffic on U.S. 69 or waiting for the bus in Wyandotte County or wondering why that one road floods every single year no matter how many times we fix it, this cannot wait. Not to mention, if we fail to act, critical surface transportation authorizations are going to run out by Friday.
I urge my colleagues to set aside gamesmanship and not see this as an opportunity for political points but instead an opportunity to deliver for our communities, the opportunity that our communities have been asking for us to deliver on.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 171
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