Tina Smith: “I can say as an Oregonian that the answer in my State is yes, we are now better off than we were 4 years ago. When I…”

“I can say as an Oregonian that the answer in my State is yes, we are now better off than we were 4 years ago. When I watched George W. Bush take his oath of office on a cold and rainy January day 3 rac{1}{2} years ago, I was very mindful that Oregon was not going into recession; we were deep into recession. We had spent 8 years of the Clinton administration watching the dismantling of 70,000 family-wage jobs in many of the natural resource industries in my State, specifically, timber industry, fishing, farming, and others. We were told we did not need low tech, we had high tech. But the bubble of high tech had already popped in Oregon. Billions of high-tech values, equities, were disappearing because they were no more than the blue sky in the end than they were in the beginning. Then we should have known it, but the tourism industry that we were told would take the place of our basic industries was in risk of peril that maybe we could not have imagined. When September 11 occurred, tourism evaporated, as well.”