Political Quotes

“Thank you very much. Sometimes I want to call you Congressman, and sometimes I want to call you General. Always we are going to say that you really know the Mississippi. You served there in the National Guard, providing the protection to the people, and to have a very good sense of what is necessary in that part of Illinois and beyond. As you were talking about the issues of moving goods and services up and down the great Mississippi River system--Ohio, Missouri, and the other rivers--there is about $1.4 trillion of goods that move down that river into the other ports across America and is shipped out across the entire world. That is 30 million jobs. You were talking about that. You also raised a point that is very important, and that is that it is not just the ongoing jobs of the tugboats and the barges, the granaries and all of that, but it is also the job of building the infrastructure itself. The men and women that are going to get out there and put together the new docks, the new levee systems--all of those things require manpower. And we know that there is an enormous benefit. Every dollar that is invested in infrastructure returns well over $3 back into the economy immediately, to say nothing of the long- term benefit that comes of having that new lock system in place, more efficient, longer locks so, as you said, more of those barges than just one towline can work their way through the lock and not have to be broken up into smaller towlines.…”