Dale Bumpers: “this is the 9th consecutive year that I have tried my very best to do justice to the taxpayers of the United States. I…”

“this is the 9th consecutive year that I have tried my very best to do justice to the taxpayers of the United States. I have heard an awful lot of talk in the last 60 days by people on both sides of the aisle about the $135 billion in tax cuts for those long-suffering taxpayers. I do not intend to debate the merits of the tax cuts tonight. What I want to debate is the cynicism, the contradiction, the hypocrisy of talking about doing justice to the taxpayers on one hand by giving them a massive tax cut, and at the same time allow the biggest mining companies in the world to take billions of dollars worth of gold off land that belongs to the taxpayers of the United States and not pay one red cent for the privilege and then turn around and give these same mining companies an enormous tax break which they never did anything to deserve. In 1872, Ulysses Grant signed the famous mining law of 1872 that encouraged people to go West and stake 20-acre claims. The 1872 mining law is still firmly intact. There are now over 330,000 claims that have been legitimately filed that belong to people who went out and simply drove 4 stakes in the ground every 20 acres and then went down to the courthouse and filed their claim. In addition, there are approximately 650 applications that have been filed with the Bureau of Land Management for patents on some of those claims which would permit the applicants to buy the land for $2.50 or $5 an acre.”