Political Quotes

“It goes back. The gentleman from Texas was not a Member during the last passage of the agriculture bill, and I was not a Member then, but there were promises made to the agriculture sector, and the promises said we want to ease the regulatory burden. It did not happen. They said we are going to open markets for you, so that they then planted for the market and did not plant based upon government intervention, a centralized control system. We have not kept those promises. A vote on this bill is a move forward in keeping the promises that were made in the last agriculture bill. And we are on the verge of a new agriculture bill. As the gentleman knows, the gentleman from Texas, the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, visited my producers at their annual meeting on Monday, and exports is the key for their survival. That is why it is so important. Again, I also mentioned other parts of the economy, whether it be heavy industrial equipment, it could be high-tech equipment. It could be that even small businesses reap tremendous benefits. I have a statistic, and I am not one that likes to throw out statistics all the time, but from 1992 to 1998, the number of Illinois companies exporting increased 50 percent, and more than 86 percent of Illinois' 14,231 companies that export are small- and medium-sized businesses.”