'Less than 6% of this alleged "infrastructure" bill would invest in roads and bridges. The total amount of funding it would direct to roads, bridges, ports, waterways, and airports combined adds up to less than what it would spend just on electric cars.'
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding infrastructure:
"Early on, a major theme of the Biden Administration has been false advertising.
"We have the so-called 'COVID relief bill' that broke a long bipartisan streak on pandemic response and only spent 1% of the money on vaccinations.
"We have the reintroduction of a sprawling election takeover bill that Democrats wrote years ago under the guise that it's a common-sense voting rights bill.
"We have a President who ran on protecting norms flirting with proposals to hot-wire the Senate's rules and pack the Supreme Court.
"And then we have the latest example, where even one Ivy League expert says Democrats' spin 'does a bit of violence to the English language.'
"They've assembled a patchwork of left-wing social engineering programs and want to label it 'infrastructure.'
"Now, as I've pointed out before, the first notable thing about the Biden Administration's plan is what it doesn't focus on.
"Less than 6% of this alleged "infrastructure" bill would invest in roads and bridges. The total amount of funding it would direct to roads, bridges, ports, waterways, and airports combined adds up to less than what it would spend just on electric cars.
"The far left sees a strong family resemblance between these proposals and their socialist 'Green New Deal.'
"Yesterday the House and Senate authors of that manifesto reintroduced it, while noting, and boasting, that the DNA of the Green New Deal is all over President Biden's legislative proposals.
"No wonder the White House's document rolling out the President's bill mentioned the words 'climate' and 'union' more often than 'roads' and 'bridges'.
"It would pick winners and losers in automotive manufacturing.
"It would force-feed the electrical grid some of the least reliable forms of energy.
"It would hector school cafeterias to stop using paper plates and force new standards and mandates on family homes.
"And the relative pittance this proposal does allocate to actual infrastructure would have to creep through a tangled environmental review process. Without serious permitting reform, it won't be build back better; it'll be build back never.
"But at least some of those bad ideas have a tangential relationship to the actual concept of infrastructure. Not so for some other statements we've heard from actual Democrats in recent days:
"Climate action is infrastructure"... "Police accountability is infrastructure"... "Caregiving is infrastructure"... "Supreme Court expansion is infrastructure" !
"Now, unsurprisingly, this liberal omnibus is not exactly an efficient engine for driving our economy.
"The White House's inflated claims of expected job creation have been fact-checked and received 'Pinocchios' from the Washington Post.
"Even under the rosiest scholarly assumptions, the White House's own favored estimates, taxpayers would pay more than $800,000 for each job this plan might create.
"I know a lot of small business owners who could create more than one job if we handed them $800,000.
"And then there are the tax hikes. This proposal is a Trojan horse to roll back the historic 2017 tax reform plan that helped spur big-time wage growth and the best job market in a generation before COVID-19.
"So the Administration's proposal bears little resemblance to the bipartisan infrastructure bill Americans need and deserve. It just reads like customer service for the radical fringe."
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