Dale Bumpers: “I have never heard so many stale arguments in my life. This is like saying we will give General Motors the steel to…”

“I have never heard so many stale arguments in my life. This is like saying we will give General Motors the steel to build cars if they will hire some people to do it. This is a simple question of giving the biggest mining companies in the world the taxpayer's resources. That is who we are talking about. This doesn't belong to the 10 Senators from the Western States. This gold and silver belongs to the taxpayers--the people I have heard talk about so many times on this tax bill, that ``we are going to give a tax cut to the long-suffering taxpayers'' and, at the same time, give away billions of dollars worth of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium that belongs to the taxpayers. This amendment has nothing to do with the gold companies' depletion, even on private lands. It has nothing to do with depletion on State lands. It has to do with the lands they got from the U.S. Government for nothing. And we are paying them to take it. We are giving them a depletion allowance to mine gold that we gave them. There is a lot more mining that goes on on private and State lands than goes on on Federal lands. They are not going offshore. They are not going broke.”