Political Quotes

“I rise in general support of this bill, H.R. 2005, because I represent a congressional district that has many durable good manufacturers. There is an issue of state preemption, and to that issue, I have been given assurance of leadership that if a conference committee is established that this issue will be discussed. Mr. Chairman, make no mistake about it. This is a vote about keeping basic manufacturing in the United States. With all the wonderful economic statistics, few people know that there is a crisis in durable goods manufacturing. I represent Rockford, Illinois, a center of machine tool manufacturing. For the past 18 months, I have heard from business leaders and workers back home that they have never had it this bad. The situation facing machine tool manufacturers is even worse than the recessions of the early 1980's and 1990's. Some old timers even believe that business prospects are even worse than the Great Depression of the 1930's. Monthly U.S. machine tool consumption once again declined 18 percent in November. Exports of U.S. machine tools also dropped 65 percent in November. Compounding this decrease is that fact that machine tool imports are taking a greater share of the declining U.S. market--rising from 50 percent in 1995 to an estimated 60 percent in 1999. Why is this happening? One reason is that foreign machine tool competitors are able to price their product more competitively because their liability exposure is relatively small.”