Cong. Westerman: Rural America Creates Country’s Wealth

Rural areas create much of America’s wealth and could better share in that wealth if they took advantage of their resources and created better environments for job creators, Rep. Bruce Westerman said Wednesday.

Westerman addressed the Delta Grassroots Caucus, a seven-state coalition of advocates and legislators meeting this week in Little Rock. He said his 4th District is 86% forestland and 12% farmland and is the nation’s number one poultry producing district.

Westerman said his 33-county district, which sprawls across southern and western Arkansas, has grown geographically in recent years because people are leaving as jobs aren’t available.

That shouldn’t be the case, Westerman said, because “Wealth comes from the land.”

Westerman, who earned a biological and agricultural engineering degree at the University of Arkansas while playing for the Razorbacks, said he tries to approach problems from an engineering perspective: Define the problem correctly, then make a plan, do the work and present the answer.

Poverty persists in rural America and high unemployment exists in the 4th District because abundant natural resources aren’t being taken advantage of and because the right environment isn’t being created for job creators.

“We’ve got all these resources,” he said. “We’ve got people that understand hard work. We’ve got great transportation systems in the Fourth District. If you think about Pine Bluff, Arkansas, we’ve got the Arkansas River, we’ve got interstate highways, and we’ve got a mainline railroad. From my engineering perspective, if we were looking at a place to locate a facility, Pine Bluff meets all the criteria for logistics. It’s like we have the ingredients there to bake a really great cake. We’ve just got to get the right chef in the kitchen and put things together.”

Westerman said that federal spending must be based on the right priorities – transportation infrastructure being one of the main ones.

Sitting on the House Budget Committee, he said he had listened to hours of hearings and had been “appalled” at how the federal government spends its money. Despite the highest tax revenues ever, the federal government continues to deficit spend. Federal debt interest payments equal $280 billion a year, and are growing, at a time when the Highway Trust Fund has a deficit of $15 billion annually.

“Just think about that. What kind of infrastructure projects could we do if we didn’t have $18 trillion in debt, and we’re making those interest payments?” he said.

To close that $15 billion Highway Trust Fund funding gap, Westerman has introduced the Prioritizing American Roads and Jobs Act. It would bring funding for expanding the Medicaid population – currently paid 100% from federal funds – down to the same level as traditional Medicaid funding, and then use half of what’s produced for highways and the rest for deficit reduction.

Meanwhile, while discretionary programs like the military are being squeezed, mandatory spending for programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid continue to grow at unsustainable rates, he said. He said, at 47, he doesn’t plan his retirement based on Social Security.

“These are good programs that were started with the right intent, but if we don’t fix them, the things that are eating up all of our expenditures are going to default,” he said.