White House: Investing More Money in FAA Has ‘Enormous Return’

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese argued that there should be more investment in the FAA and that doing so has “an enormous return” for Americans.

Deese said, “It’s unambiguous that over the last decade, we have serially underinvested in core systems and processes that have an enormous return, return for the American people in terms of safety and economic activity. And to your question of whether we can afford it, the irony is that these types of investments are exactly the ones that pay for themselves many times over. You take the investments in the IRS, building the kinds of systems to allow the IRS to make sure that people — particularly wealthy Americans — actually pay the taxes that they owe, has an enormous return. We end up reducing the deficit by generating significant revenue for every individual dollar that we invest in those programs. Similar is true in something like the FAA system. Our nation, our economy, the safety of air travel, are [of] incredible value to the economy. And so, these are high bang-for-the-buck investments. We’ve done too little of it in the past. The good news is that in important areas like the IRS, we finally have done that and are making progress. It would be a mistake to go backward, but there are other areas where we need to move forward, the FAA is one of them.”

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