I think you rightly point out the central need to fundamentally reform our education system at the elementary and secondary level, and also support it at the higher education level.

I commend the Chairman for her passionate advocacy on veterans' issues and her tireless efforts to ensure that our veterans get the care they need and the benefits they deserve.

Our veterans have given so much for our country, and they deserve our steadfast support.

A very small group of very hard-core extremists is holding the debt ceiling hostage to an agenda to attack Medicare.

We just had last week a study correlating the corporate profits that are being reported across the corporate sector and buoying the stock market with low wages.

Today's Wall Street Journal says that the median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of minority households.

The Department of Labor's ERISA fiduciary proposal takes appropriate steps to ensure that people who give retirement advice stand behind it and look out for the customer's best interest by becoming a fiduciary.

We see wealth disparity with the wealthiest Americans with a larger and larger share of the Nation's wealth really unprecedented since the robber baron era.

to bring Rhode Island's highway system to a State of good repair, we would have to double our current spending levels for 10 years.

I think the only real beneficiaries are not the rank-and-file business men and women, but those who deliberately will try to avoid following the law.

It seems from your comments that the possibility exists of having the worse of two worlds: regulations on the books which will require you under Dodd-Frank, but ineffective resources to respond to legitimate questions of business.

A modern, well-regulated market is one in which the regulators also use current technologies and techniques to keep pace with market developments.

We're often told that government should try to run more like a business. Can you think of any business that doesn't exercise its buying power to achieve price advantages?

the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare has estimated that nearly $240 billion could be saved in the Medicare program over 10 years if the Secretary were authorized to negotiate drug prices.

Indeed, we have no capital budget in the Federal Government to work with to accomplish that.

Madam Chair, if I could conclude by echoing what Mr. O'Sullivan just said...

we obviously are facing a very serious shortfall in transportation funding.

Well, how effective has it been since I believe Congress in the 1990s--in 1993, 1994--passed HOEPA, which was designed to address the issue of predatory lending?