President Obama said Friday that the Republican reluctance to spend more money on infrastructure projects is leading to problems like the massive new effort to repair the Washington, D.C., Metro system over the next year.
“[W]e got bridges, we got roads, we have ports, we have airports, we have water mains and pipes as we saw in Flint, that suffer from neglect,” Obama said at the White House after he was asked about the Metro repairs. “And the reason we’ve been neglecting them is not because we don’t know how to fix it, it’s not because people haven’t been aware of the need.”
“The problem we have is that the Republican Congress has been resistant to really taking on this problem in a serious way,” he added. “And the reason is because of an ideology that says, government spending is necessarily bad.”
He said the GOP’s ideology “has led us to not investing in those things that we have to do together.”
Obama has argued for years that Republicans aren’t open enough to boosting spending for needed infrastructure projects. The GOP has been able to roughly freeze discretionary spending for the last several years.
But Obama said infrastructure failures like the one seen in the DC metro would become more common if funding can’t be increased.
Thursday evening, another fire took place that stranded commuters for hours. Friday morning, the metro system announced a series of repair jobs that can be expected to dramatically slow the commute for people who ride the train over the next year.
“You can’t build your own metro system, you can’t build your own highway, you can’t build your own airport,” Obama said.
“If we have a mindset that says whatever government’s doing must be bad, then these are going to be the results, and it’s going to continue to get worse,” he added.
