Sam Brownback

What number are you pegging for a loss in value when we hit the bottom of this commercial real estate trough?

If we do something, is to stimulate the economy, not to stimulate the government.

So any of those that we can change to make it easier and make it more value on depreciation, or any of these investments, would be helpful?

So we are in the middle of 2011 before you would project an improvement in commercial real estate markets...

There is just not much of a market that you can establish at this point in time

Thank you very much. I think it is an excellent panel. Although you have put me in quite bit of distress from what I hear you say.

What about retail space, big boxes?

The point I wanted to make is it is a corn-soy blend. Great. All for corn-soy. But this formulation has not been changed in 30 years.

The President has provided a directive to us to accelerate the implementation of the energy provisions of the farm bill.

Now, the reason I make that point is that they polled a series of Nobel laureates and said, if you were going to put money anywhere in the world to improve the status of humanity, what would you do?

I think there is a genuine concern in rural communities.

May I suggest you or your staff take a look at a bill several of us put together and have for a series of years called the New Homestead Act?

We have tried to outline the fact that we have taken steps. Pork producers are feeling stress.

We are losing a lot of population in rural areas.

This is a Department that intersects American lives every single day in multiple ways.

A 65 percent number just seems way high to me on those two areas.

We want to develop an ecologically sustainable forest and private working land system.

It is the goal of the President. It is the goal of USDA, and I suspect it is the goal of this committee to significantly reduce childhood obesity and hunger in this country.

We want to aggressively implement the energy title provisions of the 2008 farm bill.

I am glad you are at USDA. USDA touches each American's life multiple times a day, food, housing programs, research and assistance.

We are working with our credit friends, Farm Credit and others, to try to figure out strategies and ways in which we can make resources available or restructure the resources we have.

We think there are opportunities to create wealth and repopulate rural America.

I think it is a critical diplomatic program. I think it is a critical humanitarian program.

But this is a catastrophe.

Why not look at it that way?