John Hansen: “it is interesting now that we have come into this interesting bill, which the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Regula] has done…”

“it is interesting now that we have come into this interesting bill, which the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Regula] has done some super work on, and a lot of people, the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates], have worked very hard on this particular piece of legislation. I think it is interesting that most of us who campaigned on the idea that we do not want any tax increases, we are against tax increases, if anything we are going to balance the budget this time, yet we seem to come up with an amendment that is pending that is called the Kennedy-Porter amendment which, in effect, is going to raise taxes indirectly on every American. How is it going to do that? Well, one thing, those of us who come from the West, I hope people realize that last year there were more fires in our public lands across America than any time in history, and that cost over $1.2 billion to fight them. I am a member of the Committee on National Security and we have requests from the Forest Service, BLM, and every firefighter: Give us some of those old airplanes; we want to convert them to tankers because we have to go in and fight those fires. So they are going to save $41,000, according to this amendment. At the same time we are going to spend billions and billions of dollars and we are going to decimate the West. There goes those beautiful forests. The folks from the East who fly over them and say, look at that green carpet, it is gorgeous, it is beautiful, I love it.…”