On the recordMay 10, 2011
Reclaiming my time for just a moment, a lot of people don't realize that, when you're talking about the production of oil and gas, there is much more to putting up a rig on a piece of land than just driving out there and putting it up. You build roads. You build fences. Road builders don't drill a single drop of oil or gas, but they build the roads. That's a job. That's multiple jobs. In Louisiana, in the marshy parts of the country, they used to build wooden roads to get out to these rigs. All this creates jobs for all the side industries of the oil and gas industry. Just like any other industry, there are side industries that feed the big industry, and they all create jobs in a country that dropped below 9 percent but has now jumped back this month above 9 percent again, after one of the longest stretches of high unemployment in the country. I'll just use my family as an example. My daddy was born in Kentucky, and my mother was born in Tennessee. In fact, where my mother lived may be pretty close to being underwater right now. In fact, she lived right close to the river in Tennessee. In the Great Depression, there were no jobs in their part of the country, but there were jobs in Texas because of the oil industry, so they both came down to Texas to get jobs in the oil industry.…
