Bob Kerrey: “I hope this is a piece of legislation which we can persuade our friends on the Budget Committee to make room for. It…”

“I hope this is a piece of legislation which we can persuade our friends on the Budget Committee to make room for. It will save us money in the long term. It will save us and prevent us from spending multibillions of dollars a year on ad hoc disaster assistance in some kind of a supplemental appropriation. I hope very much that we are able to get some additional room. I was disappointed we did not see it in the President's budget. He has a lot of new spending priorities. I think if we put this a bit ahead of some of the spending priorities, we ought to make room for it. I promise my colleagues, if we do that, if we change the law in this way, you will find we will be saving money in the long term trying to make certain that family-based agriculture, one of the most important parts of our economy, still producing this year at least $20 billion worth of surplus in trade--it is going to be down a it in 1999, but it is still an enormously important part of our economy--I assure my colleagues if we get room in our budget to include the cost of this expansion of crop insurance that it will save us money in the long term.”