Political Quotes

“I rise to oppose the gentleman from California's price cap amendment. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and over again searching for different results. The history of man both past and present is rife with failed attempts about price caps. This amendment asks Members to continue that same cycle. In the 1950s, before I was born, and in the 1960s, we controlled the price of natural gas and oil. By the 1970s, we had shortages and curtailments of gas and we had gas lines all over America. Over a million people were laid off and money poured out of the United States to countries such as Algeria for high-priced LNG. Members may not know that the California wholesale market also has had price caps. What happened? The power and the capital investment went elsewhere. So on June 19 of this year FERC applied price caps to the entire West. What happened? Blackouts in Las Vegas. California also had retail price caps in place at the start of its failed restructuring experiment in April of 1998. In the spring of 2001, the biggest growth industry for the California Public Utilities Commission was the processing of blackout exemption applications. When will we learn? Oppose the price caps.”