Political Quotes

“Let me start with congratulating both the chairman of the committee and the ranking member for including commonsense reforms in this WRRDA bill of this Congress; and with those commonsense reforms, I have just one to add. Right now, when the Corps of Engineers does their cost-benefit analysis, they only look at the brick and mortar of the property that they are looking to protect. Well, that just doesn't make sense when we are talking about things that affect our economy. For example, you can't just look at the bricks and mortars of the Port of New York. The Port of New York pays about $3.7 billion in taxes to the Federal Government every year. So if you only looked at the cost of the port, to rebuild the Port of New York, you would certainly miss the billions and billions of dollars' worth of impact. There is an example in Louisiana where the port is thinking about building a levee. It includes not only the port, but it also includes our refineries, where we know that if those residents are forced to evacuate, like in Isaac, the cost of gas went up 7 cents around the country for 5 days. So you can't just look at the cost of those homes, when we know that that keeps the price of gas down and would affect the national economy. So this is just one more of those commonsense reforms, Mr.…”