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REBUILDING OF AMERICA BEGINS NOW
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Brendan F. Boyle) for 5 minutes.
Mr. BRENDAN F. BOYLE of Pennsylvania. Madam Speaker, we feel the wind of history at our back this week and next. This has been a long time coming. Not since the mid-1960s have we had such an opportunity to do so many big, bold, and historic things as we have in front of us right now; things like paid family leave; modernizing and rebuilding our K-12 public schools, tuition-free community college, universal pre-K; and injecting the single biggest investment in our infrastructure in our Nation's history, roads, bridges, rail, replacing water and sewer lines that have been there for over a century, taking out old gas lines that are dangerous, leaded pipes that have literally cost lives.
This is all right in front of us right now, and here in the House, it hangs by perhaps a few votes. Just one or two votes may make the critical difference.
Every single one of these measures I mentioned is popular, every single one. And it is not just Democrats. Sixty-six percent of Americans support the package I just described. That includes 61 percent of Independents, and even 39 percent of Republicans.
The American people get it. They recognize that we must rebuild America, rebuild our infrastructure in terms of our physical infrastructure and the infrastructure of our society.
Now, some might ask, understandably, okay, all these things sound great, but how are you going to pay for it?
Well, in the Ways and Means Committee, we just put our money where our mouth is. We just put up vote after vote to raise taxes on the richest one-tenth of 1 percent; to raise the revenue necessary to fund every single one of the priorities that I just described.
I understand there are those who want to keep things as they are; who don't believe we should invest in our infrastructure; don't believe we should have paid family leave, even though the rest of the industrialized world has it and has for decades; don't believe that we should have funding for child care.
They want to keep the system the way it is. They like the idea that there was just a $2 trillion tax cut under the previous administration, none of it paid for and, according to CBO, 83 percent of it going to the richest 1 percent. They are fine with that.
But in terms of reforming our tax system to make the richest Americans pay their fair share and to use that money to invest in the American people, they are opposed to that.
Well, I proudly support it. This will be one of the best votes I cast in my career. This is an exciting, truly transformative time in our Nation's history. It is now incumbent upon all of us in the House, all of us in the Senate, to seize this moment. The rebuilding of America begins now.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 164
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