Jeff Miller: “I stand up here to a certain degree reluctantly, being a strong supporter of this particular amendment, because I am a…”

“I stand up here to a certain degree reluctantly, being a strong supporter of this particular amendment, because I am a member of the subcommittee with the chairman, the gentleman from Ohio, and I have no greater admiration for anyone than I have for the gentleman, especially with the hard work he has done to bring this bill to the floor today. So many of my colleagues and friends who I vote with most of the time are on the other side of the issue. But this is an issue that if one is a fiscal conservative and one also loves the environment, it is a natural amendment to vote for. Mr. Chairman, let us get the facts straight here. First of all, we have heard the number of miles we are talking about, 380,000 miles. That is 15 times around the world. That is a lot of miles to be built in the national forests to start with. Mr. Chairman, the amount of logs that are taken out of the national forests is a very small amount of the total number of logs in the United States. It only represents 4 to 5 percent of the total amount of commercial logging in the United States. So we are not talking about devastating the entire logging industry of the United States. Mr. Chairman, there are two major reasons I believe we should be supporting the amendment; first, as a fiscal conservative, it is an issue of money. GAO did a study here about a year or so ago talking about the money. It costs us hundreds of millions of dollars every year to run this program.”