Political Quotes

“we all returned to Washington last week after, in my case, spending 5 weeks in the State of Montana. It is always great being in Montana, being able to get around the State and visit with folks and see the challenges they are dealing with on a daily basis and hear directly from them. I can tell you that one of the things I heard a lot about--Montana is an ag State--was the price of grain and the price of cattle. The marketplace is very, very depressed. It doesn't matter that Montana is a big State, and it doesn't matter what corner of the State you are in. We have some challenges, and those challenges have been brought about by really, really bad public policy when it comes to tariffs. These tariffs have increased the price of steel, for example, which increases the price of the equipment that folks in agriculture and everybody have to buy. On the other side of the coin, because of the tariffs that are put on ag commodities, it has driven all ag commodities down. The tariffs on soy, for example, have driven all the commodities down, including wheat, which we raise a lot of in Montana, but also pulse crops and everything. In fact, when I was determining what we were going to plant this spring, I was trying to find what we could make money off of. Quite frankly, commodity prices are down across the board, and there wasn't anything that you could turn a profit on. I don't say that being a farmer who wants to complain about prices, because we do that occasionally.…”