Dan Coats: “I wish to say to the Senator from California, many of the points she made are valid. I came back for the purpose of…”

“I wish to say to the Senator from California, many of the points she made are valid. I came back for the purpose of addressing our overspending and that involves all kinds of tax expenditures and all kinds of subsidies. It is necessary because of our current debt and deficit situation. We have to get control of this. It is the only reason I ran. It is the only reason I am back in the Senate, with a commitment from the people of Indiana who supported me that, yes, this is what needs to be done in Washington. So I am not here to criticize the efforts of Senator Coburn or Senator Feinstein and others to begin to address these subsidies. That is exactly what we need to do. I think the phrase of the Senator from California: ``This is what we are doing in a timely way,'' goes to the heart and the essence of where I believe we need to go. We have subsidized, for some valid reasons early on, the production of ethanol. We did that because we said we are not independent in terms of our energy production, and our dependence on oil--particularly Middle Eastern oil. Our dependence is not only costly to us from the standpoint of OPEC setting the price of oil worldwide, based on their output, but also from the standpoint that we have spent a lot of money in blood and treasure to continue this dependence on oil, by placing troops in the Middle East.…”