Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. In closing, I go back to this idea of what mining in America could mean to America. We know that it has national security implications. We know that it has critical implications on being able to grow our energy sector, to grow our economy. I want to look at just strictly the mining and manufacturing component from mining. I have already submitted this report for the record, page 4, which USGS, along with Commerce, puts out every year. It shows how much material we mine in the U.S., how much we export, and how much we import. The net value last year was $129.7 billion. Of all the ore that we mined and the exports and imports, it was worth $129.7 billion. That is a lot of wealth, but it pales in comparison to the amount of wealth that is generated when that raw material is converted into a metal. That material was worth $890 billion when it was refined into metal. When we talk about generating wealth, we are generating income for local communities and American workers not just by mining that ore but by processing it into metal, where we can increase it by eight or nine times the value, which means income for rural Americans. This same report shows us that $890 billion worth of value created from this material, along with another $102 billion worth of material that we had to import, created an impact on our economy of $3.9 trillion. Think about that.…”