Politics & Power Quote by Dennis Hastert

Numbers are doing the heavy lifting here, and that is the point. By leading with “more than 67 percent,” Hastert borrows the authority of logistics and spreadsheets to make a political argument sound like physics: if most freight rides on highways, then asphalt becomes destiny. It’s a neat rhetorical move for a politician: frame infrastructure not as pork, not as local patronage, but as national competitiveness - a word that flatters both business interests and anxious middle-class voters who hear “international” and think jobs leaving town.

The phrase “economists believe” is another strategic shelter. It outsources judgment to an expert class without committing to a specific policy choice, budget number, or trade-off. “Quality of our infrastructure” stays conveniently vague: it could mean repairing bridges, expanding lanes, upgrading ports, or modernizing freight corridors. That ambiguity widens the coalition: everyone can project their preferred project onto the sentence, from unions to contractors to chamber-of-commerce types.

The subtext is that global competition isn’t only fought in boardrooms or classrooms; it’s fought in commute times, bottlenecks, and crumbling interchanges. It’s also an implicit rebuke to short-term austerity politics: underinvesting in roads isn’t just inconvenience, it’s self-sabotage. Coming from a congressional leader in an era when “free trade” rhetoric often outpaced public investment, the line tries to stitch together pro-market internationalism with a very old American argument: big economic ambitions require big public works.