... speaking broadly on the administration's fiscal attitudes at today's Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation hearing on FAA Reauthorization
SEN. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV (D-WV): My own predilection is that America's making a tremendous mistake, right now, by doing everything short-term and incrementally, that we're not looking at the big picture, that we have to virtually reconstruct America from every single point of view, from our education system, to our transportation system in all of its forms, to a war on terror, to homeland security. I mean, the list never ends.
But -- and I think we have about a 10 to 15-year window in which to do this. The next question is: How can you afford that?
I have absolutely no idea. But I do know this, that when President Clinton left office, he had a $5.6 trillion surplus.
He may not, because of his Congress at the time, have been able to get away with it, but he could have figured something out with his lawyers, to take that $5.6 trillion, not use it into paying down debt but to use it to, for the one time in our recent life, in generational life, to create a construction fund, you know, a "build America" fund, everything from education to transportation to everything else.
We have enormous needs. We are not meeting them. At the rate that we are going, we will not meet them.
We have become a Congress and a society of incrementalists because we are forced to do that by our economic situation and by various things going on in the world and the rest of it. And we're not going to make it, in my judgment.
Just speaking as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I don't think we're going to make it. I don't think we have the time to make it, unless we do these things in a fairly short period time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
He's seriously recommending that we should spend on public works rather than pay down the national debt?
But it's just hypothetical, since that surplus is long gone now. And I agree it would have been a stupid Robin Hood-esque thing for Clinton to have done back then, unless he had some prescience about how much was going to be stolen from the public infrastructure by his successor. But I don't think the worst pessimist could have imagined our current reality, so yeah, it would have been a stupid thing for him to have done.
Post a Comment