Bernie Sanders: Do Republicans Want America to Become a Third World Country?

[babylonsister]

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/do-republicans-want-america-to-become-a-third-world-country?utm_source=berniebuzz&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Read+more+link&utm_campaign=National+Bernie+Buzz+07-10


Do Republicans Want America to Become a Third World Country?



The federal Highway Trust Fund is expected to go broke in early August unless Congress comes up with a new source of revenue to augment the federal gasoline tax. If the fund dries up, road and bridge construction projects could be put on hold across the country during the peak of the summer construction season. Altogether, an estimated 112,000 construction projects could be cancelled and 700,000 jobs lost. The Vermont Transportation Agency already has announced that it is poised to delay 38 bridge, rail and road projects.

What do the Republicans in Congress want to do? How much are they prepared to invest in our crumbling infrastructure? “Unbelievably,” said Sen, Bernie Sanders, “the answer is NOTHING. At a time when we have massive income and wealth inequality, and one out of four corporations pays nothing in federal income taxes, the Republicans are rejecting all efforts to raise new revenue to rebuild our country and create jobs.”

Sanders is a member of the Senate public works committee. “For most of our history,” he said, “the United States led the world in transportation innovation, from a network of canals, to the transcontinental railroad to the interstate highway system. These innovations gave our economy a competitive advantage and our workers a decent standard of living. These investments made us the economic leader of the world.

“Unfortunately, however, right-wing Republicans have a different vision. Their anti-government, anti-tax ideology is so extreme that they are prepared to allow America to descend into a Third World infrastructure and, in the process, sabotage our economy and job growth.

“Now is the time for the American people to say NO to Republican extremism and demand that we build a modern and productive infrastructure which supports a growing economy.”

[Enthusiast]

2. If the Republicans would happen to win the presidency in 2016

they would embark on an infrastructure rebuilding plan the likes of which we have never seen. I suspect. All on borrowed money. Deficits don't matter (when there is a Republican president).

[babylonsister]

3. You're exactly right. So we need to beat them to the punch. nt

[Martin Eden]

5. I'm not so sure you're right about that.

The Republicans with their obstruction and refusal to do anything constructive are largely responsible for the abysimally poor approval ratings of Congress, but perversely this works to their advantage because their overall strategy and is to make the public believe their own government is the problem and not the solution.

Mike Lofgren (a longtime GOP staffer who "left the cult&quot explained it very well in the essay linked below. If you haven't read it (written in Sept 2011 in the wake of the debt ceiling crisis) please do:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult

[ClarkeVII]

4. The Republicans who are...

in the 1% do. The rest of them believe it because they have bought into the nonsense.

[SamKnause]

6. The Pentagon paid $8,000.00 for a $445.06 part.

Currently the Pentagon has overpaid 9 Million dollars for this part.

The budget for this year will over pay 2.6 Million dollars for this part.

The F-35 is expected to cost 1 Trillion dollars.

Our tax dollars are being squandered !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't want the U.S. to become a third world country, though it seems we are on the fast track in that direction.

I want every penny of our tax dollars accounted for !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!