Ray LaHood Quotes

I am convinced that I do not want to give up more power to the White House, whether it's George Bush or Barack Obama. And I'm going to fight as hard as I can against President Obama on these earmarks and my Republican colleagues who hate to vote for them, but love to get them.

The country needs a gas tax.... That's good for the country.... What's good for the country is good for Chrysler.

One wonders whether the Obama re-election campaign may be on the right track as it seeks to apply the you-break-it-you-own-it rule to Bush and the American economy. Hardly a day goes by without President Obama or his surrogates arguing that it takes longer than four years to recover from an economic crisis so long in the making.

Federal gas tax revenues that are paid into the trust fund by highway users should be used for programs that benefit highway users.

I believe that States should be credited for their non-Federal investment in revenue-generating transportation facilities to address their regional transportation needs.

How we fund transportation in this country is broken. You all pay a gasoline tax, right? Well, cars go farther, we get electric cars, and so on. And then we do more with the money than just build roads. We do bike lanes and mass transit.

The gas tax has been the backbone of the transportation system since the inception of the Interstate highway system in the 1950s.

Transportation spending is a win-win proposition.

What America really needs is a long-term bill that makes significant investments in our transportation infrastructure and reforms the highway trust fund to ensure it remains solvent for years to come. This will require bold ideas and a bipartisan effort.

A gas tax could be one important element of an integrated energy policy.

The war on driving includes calls for carbon and gas taxes, tens of billions of gas tax money diverted to inefficient and little-used mass transit projects, and opposition to building new roads and highways.

One answer to transportation infrastructure funding is public-private partnerships.

We're actually just moving one type of deficit to another. But, the problem with this second type of deficit is that you drive on it and then it falls down.

Last time Congress passed a major six-year transportation bill was in 1997, since then there have been 21 short-term extensions.

The last time we raised the gas tax, which is how we built the interstate system, was 1993.

If you have the desire, if you really had people with the burning desire to lower taxes, it would be done. We know the Democrats don't want to do it.

I mean, the 1930s are the birth moment of modern public sector, government-driven infrastructure spending.

Historically, things were moving in a pretty good direction until the Reagan presidency. And then it all got reversed. The Mexico City policy was instituted - the idea of wrecking the environment for this generation's profit and forgetting about our gets got firmly embedded. I'm sad to say the Clinton administration didn't turn it around and the Bush administration, well, I think they're the worst administration we've ever had, and I used to be a Republican.

On the spending, don't forget bridges and roads. It's like puppies and ice cream - who doesn't like them?

There are several states that move from Karl Marx-like policies to Adam Smith-like policies and back again in a weekend. So for the states with huge volatility in their income tax policies over time, the differences in growth rates in those periods are really amazingly consistent with tax rates really mattering.

I've laid out my economic plans. I want to grow the economy. That's why I have plans for jobs and raising incomes. I do want to go after bad actors on and off Wall Street, because I think companies that take money from federal, state, and local governments and then pick up and move should have to pay that back.

Up until 1986, the top marginal rate, the top statutory rate was 50 percent. Now it's 35 percent. And all the pressure is on to lower that even further. And this just doesn't make a great deal of sense. When people say, 'Oh, we can't raise taxes on the rich. They'll go on strike, they'll move to another country.' But within recent memory, it hasn't been that long ago that we had rates that were substantially higher. And these people did just fine. I just think that there's a disconnect between the facts of what taxes do and the sort of mythology of what they do.

If the government can't get the economy moving again, they have a lot of fundamental problems.

It's nice to get president candidates' attention to infrastructure need which is really a ticking time bomb in America. But as important as the dollar amounts are, we need to know that this money is gonna go directly to cities. So we're gonna be able to put it to use. In previous administrations and in previous efforts on infrastructure, the money has gone through states and it never seems to find its way to the nation's cities.

Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.