John W. Olver: “Here we have kind of the yang that went with the yin. The gentleman's amendment here a few minutes ago, the last one…”

“Here we have kind of the yang that went with the yin. The gentleman's amendment here a few minutes ago, the last one that he offered, was $3.5 billion, and taking that out of this allocation. {time} 1420 In this case, it's a $6 million amount. That's about 5,000 times as much as the six. The first was 5,000 times as much as this one. Maybe I'm off by an order of magnitude. I'm not quite sure. The gentleman from California has pointed out that the President did not want to do this at all. Well, actually, the President had asked the committee to create a user fee to pay for this rather than the mechanism by which this really very small program--this $6 million program of loan guarantees--has been functioning, which was to pay for any risk involved. The gentleman is claiming, if there were any serious risk, that it should be paid for out of the subsequent years' allocations under CDBG. It turns out, for those places that would use this program, the loan guarantee program, there has never been a penny lost of the Federal taxpayers on any of the section 108 projects that we have issued in this program, and there have been a number of them. It actually is one of the most flexible. The Community Development loan guarantee program is exceedingly flexible and very creative.…”