Infrastructure
Floor Speech
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Mr. COONS. Madam President, let me also, if I can, speak for a few more moments about the historic deal reached earlier today on infrastructure.
This is about creating jobs. This is about investing in our economy and our communities and our country, and this is about strengthening the United States globally against our adversaries and competitors.
I need not remind you that just 1 year ago public health and economic crises created by the COVID-19 pandemic were ravaging communities all over our Nation. And today, under the leadership of the Biden administration, COVID-19 cases and deaths are down by over 90 percent. More than 70 percent of adults over the age of 30 have been vaccinated. As a result, businesses are opening, communities are opening, States are opening, our unemployment rate has come down significantly, and our economy is recovering at a robust pace.
But if our economy is going to be sustainable, if it is going to be long term, if it is going to be robust, we have to make long-overdue investments in infrastructure. Globally, the United States now ranks 13th in infrastructure. In every State, we have roads, bridges, tunnels, and water systems that are crumbling or aged. Just in my little State of Delaware, we have more than 200 miles of highway deemed in poor condition.
And as the climate continues to change, low-lying States like mine are particularly susceptible to increased damage. We had more than 10 extreme weather events causing up to $2 billion of damage in the last decade, and a lot of that damaged our infrastructure because it is built right up against the waterways, the coasts, the bays.
We have one of the most important rail lines in the entire country, the Northeast corridor, that runs right through Wilmington, DE. One day without service on this Northeast corridor costs our economy $100 million. And that day isn't hypothetical; it happened during Superstorm Sandy, the hurricane that pummeled the east coast a few years ago.
Across our State and every State, infrastructure is in dire need of repair, of resiliency, and of upgrade, and doing that can help create jobs and strengthen our country.
We are losing our competitive edge, and our global competitors, like China, are outpacing us. That is why I was so encouraged to see the bipartisan U.S. Innovation and Competition Act pass this body just a few weeks ago. A key piece of it was the bipartisan CHIPS Act that recognizes we need to invest in cutting-edge R&D, in semiconductors, and in the industries of the future.
But we can't move people, capital, products, and ideas if we don't invest in our infrastructure--in the broadband, the highways, the ports, and the roads that make us competitive globally.
The $559 billion in new Federal spending on infrastructure that is the core of the deal announced today is a downpayment on rebuilding our roads and bridges, fixing our lines of public transit, and expanding port and airport capacity. It also includes $47 billion toward climate resiliency, critically needed work to make sure that our infrastructure can sustain the growing storms all across our country.
I think this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put America on the right track and exactly at a moment when the leaders of China and Russia are telling the world that American democracy can't work; that the riot that occurred in this building on January 6 is foreshadowing the collapse, the failure of American democracy. It is important for us to show our citizens here at home and our competitors abroad that American democracy still works and that we can deliver meaningful solutions for our States, for our country, and for the world.
There is a lot more for us to accomplish on President Biden's agenda--the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan--and we will have to move that forward, but I think this is a day for us to celebrate legislating together and finding a pathway to the House and to the President's desk for the biggest investment in infrastructure of my lifetime.
This is a great day for this institution and our country.
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