John Rice Carter: “I would like to address for a moment some of the things that were said by my friends on the other side of the aisle.…”

“I would like to address for a moment some of the things that were said by my friends on the other side of the aisle. It's true that there may be 1,300 new jobs, as he quoted. But 1,300 new inspectors are not jobs in the cement industry. The cost of doing the conversion, according to the industry spokesman, is about $3.5 billion industrywide, and even then they're not sure they're meeting all standards that are being required by EPA. One for-instance in this requirement of EPA is, hydrochloric acid has never been considered a problem by EPA, and all of a sudden there's a regulation on hydrochloric acid. This is an almost $4 billion cost to an industry whose total net worth is approximately $10 billion. That is a tremendous, tremendous burden to place on this industry. Quite honestly, what we're trying to accomplish by this before this regulation is actually implemented is to say, Time out. We're not funding this until you get back to the table and start working out a reasonable way to save American jobs and not encourage foreign jobs to take jobs away from America. That's what this does.”