Political Quotes

“I would yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock). Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I rise in opposition to this measure, which they call Cash for Caulkers, since it's based on the Cash for Clunkers program, and maybe, before we go any further, somebody needs to ask, Well, how did that last one work out? In fact, economists at Edmunds.com did exactly that. They discovered that of the 690,000 cars sold under Cash for Clunkers, 565,000 sales would have happened anyway, which means the taxpayers ended up paying about $24,000 for every genuine sale that it actually stimulated. But it gets worse. All the program accomplished was to entice people to move up their purchase decisions by a few months, which then caused below-normal sales in the months that followed. In other words, Congress spent $4 billion creating a car bubble. With that fresh economic wreckage just behind us, we're about to create a $6.6 billion home improvement bubble. We can now replace our ``Honk if you're making my car payments'' bumper sticker with ``Honk if you're paying for my home remodeling.'' What is this actually going to accomplish? First, a lot of fraud. We already know that the Energy Star program approved 15 out of 20 fake products that were submitted to them by the GAO, including a gasoline-powered alarm clock. One can only imagine what home improvement scams taxpayers will fund from this one.…”