WASHINGTON   –  “When one of our many successful Southern Missouri businesses expands its payrolls, it’s a great day in the community.  There’s positive buzz about the news, and people get excited about the fact that their city is growing.  It’s hard work to create those kinds of opportunities, but we all know it will pay dividends when a company is ready to expand.

Hiring definitely carries a cost for a business, which must carefully examine its bottom line before making the commitment to add an employee. 

So it was extremely out-of-the-ordinary when the Administration announced very early this year that it was pursuing a $787 billion economic “stimulus” package to boost job growth in the U.S.  Before I voted against the bill I read it, and I asked a lot of questions.  I will spare you the details, but the most pressing question I asked was this: If the goal of the stimulus is to create jobs, why doesn’t the bill focus more on the economic infrastructure of our country?

We have the state-of-the-art skills, we work harder than anyone in the world, and we have communities built around the idea of contributing something to our public life, our economy, and our future. 

Roads, bridges, locks and dams are the logical choices to expand the public system of transportation in this country.  All of them carry U.S. products to markets around the country and throughout the world – and they are an integral part of our economic infrastructure that, in some cases, hasn’t been updated in two generations.  The safety of this national asset is a serious consideration for policymakers, and it is expensive to build, rebuild and maintain.  Which is why transportation was a natural objective for the stimulus – spending money on carefully-identified construction projects would create jobs immediately and pay dividends in our national productivity for decades.

Today, some seven months after the passage of the stimulus, approximately $90 billion in taxpayer funds has been spent out of it.  Far less than ten percent of the money set aside for national transportation infrastructure has been spent, and even that priority was too small a part of the total package to begin with.  It is no accident that the national unemployment rate has risen two points nationally in that same amount of time – up to 9.4 percent in Missouri – and the Administration has switched its rhetorical position from creating jobs to creating or saving jobs. 

This crucial error and rhetorical shift would be bad enough on their own, but something even worse has come from the stimulus I opposed in January and February.  The main source of jobs created by the stimulus is – you guessed it – the federal government.  On October 15, businesses with federal contracts reported directly creating (or saving) 30,383 jobs in the first months of $16 billion in stimulus spending.  That’s $533,000 spent per job.

No respectable business would operate that way.  No reasonable family would structure its finances that way.  And our federal government should be reasonable and respectable enough to act responsibly with taxpayer money.  I suggest using it to repave the roads, rebuild the bridges, and renew the waterways that carry Americans to work and take American goods to market around the globe.  It’s not too late to rededicate ourselves to that priority.”