Sen. Booker on Amtrak: ‘Lack of Infrastructure Spending Is Costing Us Lives in America’

TODD: “All right, let me move to the Amtrak derailment. You know, this week, some House Republicans have been criticizing some Democrats, not you by name, but other Democrats, for attempting to politicize this derailment. Do you think that’s a fair critique?”
BOOKER: “Well, look, I think it’s a distraction from the reality. United States of America is falling behind dramatically its global peers in terms of the quality of its infrastructure. We have trillions of dollars of an infrastructure debt right now. And the accident that we saw happen, which the NTSB says could have been prevented, should we have had positive train control, we should not be scrimping on investments in public safety.

“But what’s even more important to understand this, as China invests about 9% of their G.D.P. in infrastructure, Japan 6%, Europe 5%, America’s only doing 1.5%. By withholding this investment, in what America used to dominate the globe in, the number one infrastructure globally, now out of the top ten, depending on who you look at, number 12 or 18th, we are losing economic competitiveness.

“We are losing out on jobs. We are missing out on growth. So let’s leave that partisan argument aside for a second and just say the fiscally conservative thing to do right now is to invest in your, whether it was a company in your physical plant, whether a homeowner in your roof, but as a nation, we have fallen way out of pace with where we were in previous years in terms of overall investment.”
TODD: “But do you really think it’s a fair implication that the lack of infrastructure spending is to blame for this accident?”
BOOKER: “I think the lack of infrastructure spending is costing us lives in America. It’s costing every commuter. In my region especially, you see commuters paying over $1,000 a year in terms of damage to their cars, lost productivity. It’s costing us in economic growth, it’s costing us in jobs. And so the safety of our roads and bridges, we already know unequivocally, months I’ve been working on this issue.

“We know unequivocally our safety as a nation, our air traffic, our aviation infrastructure, our rail infrastructure, our roads and bridges, is inadequate. We should be investing more. That’s unequivocal, unassailable. And for us not to do that in a bipartisan fashion is unacceptable to me. And it’s what we should be working on.”