Political Quotes

“I have come to the floor--I don't come to the floor every day, but every day that I come here you are presiding. Either I am coming here more often than I thought or you are presiding more than most people do. Maybe you just drew the short straw, but at the end of the day, I enjoy having these conversations with you, even when most of our colleagues have packed up and headed for places near and far--mostly far. I have a couple of charts here today I would like for us to go over. The first one is--I like these bar graphs. This is an interesting one. We have Great Britain on this axis right here. We have information about the relative amount of fuel taxes countries have. Great Britain is the world champ. They have the biggest fuel taxes of anybody, and they have had for quite a while. All the way over here is the U.S.A. There is an outfit called the OECD, which I would say is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It doesn't have 41 nations; maybe it has about 37 or 38. They are arrayed right here. There are Russia, India, and Brazil. This gives you some sense of how different nations pay for their transportation infrastructure. A bunch of nations, like Great Britain, use their fuel taxes to help balance the budget. Great Britain is here, and then we have these other countries--Luxembourg, Spain, Argentina. You get all the way down here, and there is Brazil. They are like off the charts.…”