DeFazio: "71 percent of Republicans" would pay more taxes for ...infrastructure!

So said Peter DeFazio Wednesday evening on the Rachel Maddow Show, referring to a poll taken by Republican Frank Luntz.

(Actually, it was 74%, which astounded even Luntz.)

In response to Rachel's reminder that the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that, in order to bring the country's infrastructure up to code, "we need to spend about $2.2 trillion... over the course of the next five years", DeFazio said the current stimulus bill falls waaaaay short of that.  In the House bill, said DeFazio,

"Transportation and infrastructure [amount to] about $43 million, and the most generous interpretation of the infrastructure in this bill around $100 billion, which is a pretty small fraction of $1 trillion."

Indeed.  (Although I think he meant $43 billion, not million.)

Or as Rachel said on Friday's show, tax cuts make up a third of the stimulus bill.  Infrastructure?  Less than a fifth.

And about those tax cuts, which Republicans love and were stuck into the bill to curry their favor, which didn't work (zero votes for, remember?)  DeFazio had this to say:

"What‘s this $300 billion of tax cuts about, we know that tax cuts don‘t work.  We tried them with Bush."

And with Reagan before Bush.  It was called "supply side economics", or "let's-make-the-rich-even-richer-with-taxpayer-money-and-bankrupt-the-government-in-the-process."

You see where that's gotten us.

You gotta love Pete DeFazio.  Maybe he should come back home and run for governor.

Comments

[Harry Kershner]

The devil is in the details.

What is meant by "infrastructure"? Should we massively fund projects that themselves destroy the environment and that encourage citizens to continue to use cars?

Should we build new facilities for "clean water" when we're already flushing huge amounts of water literally down the toilet instead of conserving the water and composting our wastes?

And should we spend huge amounts of money on "stimulus packages" that won't work?

The economists and analysts whom I most respect think this is just a political exercise that will have little effect on the general welfare.