Political Quotes

“I want to say that the Senator from Alaska does an excellent job of representing the oil companies. She puts forward the oil companies' arguments magnificently. She is very good at it. She was an economics major, and so was I. She said what she learned in her time, and let me tell you what I learned. I learned that corporate welfare is wrong, that corporate welfare to companies that are on the Fortune 500 list is particularly wrong. ExxonMobil, No. 2 on the Fortune 500--excuse me if I do not cry for Exxon. Forgive me if I shed no tears for Chevron--they are No. 3--and forgive me, ConocoPhillips. You are No. 4, but you are working on it. I tell you whom I shed tears for--my people at home who are having to pay ridiculous prices and who also have to face a Federal deficit and are looking to us for leadership here. And leadership requires us to say: How long do you have to give corporate welfare to oil companies that have been getting it for 100 years? Count them--100 years. And they are so huge. They are multinational. They are multibillion. I will get into what their people earn, what their CEOs earn in a minute. So I learned that corporate welfare is bad. It distorts the market. And to compare the tax deductions Big Oil has with the home mortgage deduction gets right under my skin because the people who benefit from the home mortgage deduction are primarily the middle class of this country.…”