Sam Brownback: “I am pleased to join colleagues in the introduction of the New Homestead Act. I am very pleased to be a supporter along…”

“I am pleased to join colleagues in the introduction of the New Homestead Act. I am very pleased to be a supporter along with my colleagues from North Dakota, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Alexander Hamilton once made a statement I think is particularly applicable to the current situation we are discussing--what is happening in rural America, particularly in a swath of rural America from Texas north to the Canadian border that includes the State of the Presiding Officer and a number of States throughout the Midwest. He said: To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted. We must encourage and support intellectual activity and enterprise, and the area in which this has been most neglected has been in our rural communities. We must change this before some of these precious entities wither away. Every year, rural communities become emptier and more desolate as fewer and fewer people remain.”