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Obama pushes for infrastructure bank proposal after debt deal
Making the case that it was important for Congress to agree on a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, President Obama said Monday that doing so could free lawmakers to consider other job creation ideas, such as the infrastructure bank proposed by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).
Speaking at the end of a roughly 40-minute news conference Friday against a backdrop of last week's smaller-than-expected job growth report, Obama again made the case for the infrastructure bank.
"The infrastructure bank that we've proposed is relatively small," he said. "But could we imagine a project where we're rebuilding roads, bridges and ports and schools and broadband lines and smart-grids and taking all those construction workers and putting them back to work right now?
In March, Kerry and Hutchison proposed creating an American Infrastructure Financing Authority at an initial cost of about $10 billion. It would provide loans and loan guarantees for large infrastructure projects.
President Obama included about $30 billion for the bank in the $556 billion he proposed spending on a highway bill over six-years, but lawmakers have recently unveiled figures that a significantly less than that amount. The Democratically-controlled Senate is pursuing a two-year, $104 billion bill, which will have a higher per-year average than the House's proposal for a six-year, $230 billion bill.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) has said the House version of the bill will eschew a federal infrastructure bank in lieu of encouraging states to create their own.
"That way they won't have to come to Washington to get approval," Mica said as he rolled out his proposed transportation bill last week.
