Tom Carper

We have to do better than this. Otherwise, we will end up having $1.5 trillion deficits for as far as the eye can see. We cannot afford that.

One of the questions I often ask of witnesses, particularly when we see a real problem, $402 billion worth in cost overruns, what can we do to help?

We ended up with a balanced budget approach that worked on the defense side, defense spending, worked on domestic discretionary spending, worked on entitlements, and also revenues.

Now, more than ever we have to find the best value for our tax dollars, and I am amazed as I stay here longer as to how much we actually waste and how we do things and how we really should be doing it better.

An ounce of prevention, as my grandmother used to say, 'Is worth a pound of cure.'

We try to work on prevention with respect to health care.

We need to change the thinking that if only we give a program a couple more years and a couple more billion dollars the program will ultimately be successful.

It is no secret that the overruns in the DOD acquisitions consume billions of dollars every year, and I am still amazed.

I would rather spend the money, quite frankly, going after the people that have either breached the contract or not performed instead of just saying here is the check, we are going to close you down.

One of the questions that I think President George Herbert Walker Bush faced as he signed into the law the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments was how are going to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions?

In the end, the approach of using market forces, some of us were skeptical as to whether that would actually work, turned out it worked pretty well.

The real loser is the American consumer.

One of the things that I try to focus on here is how do we develop consensus.

The question is do consumers want to pay for the value that they get from particularly clean air? I think we should leave that to them to decide.

I am sorry. I do not understand. You say if the electricity prices raise because of natural gas----

It tells us that they are there to be employed and it also tells us that they need the employment in order to pursue their careers.

Give us a reasonable amount of time, give us some flexibility and get out of the way.

We have thousands of kids that are not in school today because of the asthma, because they cannot breathe the air, and it is just not fair.

We have. Now what we need to do is to spend some serious dollars on implementing that technology that Alstom and others have.

The folks in the Chesapeake who make their living off of, as watermen, do not much like this. They have called on their elected officials to work on the rest of us to try to clean up our runoff.

If this led to having Congress, once again, take up comprehensive climate change legislation, we think that would be a wonderful thing.

To me, that is going to cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Do you believe this facility will meet recent EPA regulations of air toxics and SOx and NOx?

If we choose wrong here, the implications are very, very serious.

The Chesapeake Bay has been struggling for a long time with sedimentation, all kinds of nutrients and so forth that have led to, that are killing parts of, vast parts of the Chesapeake Bay.