Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague Senator Toomey to talk about what truly is an egregious oversight in the underlying farm bill we are considering. This morning, the Senate is going to have the opportunity to vote on an amendment that would repeal the Sugar Program. As Senator Toomey has pointed out, I submitted several amendments. One would reform the Sugar Program. The one we are going to vote on this morning is the one to actually repeal the program. I, as does Senator Toomey, hope we will get a vote on both, but I certainly hope people will vote against the tabling motion to repeal the Sugar Program. The underlying farm bill we are considering reforms almost every farm program we have. Every farm group has had to sacrifice with this farm bill so we can reform these programs. Unfortunately, there is one glaring exception to these reforms; that is, the Sugar Program. We need to reform the sugar subsidy because it costs consumers and businesses $3.5 billion each year in the form of higher prices. That is almost double the world average. We can see on this chart--which shows sugar prices over the last 30 years since 1981. This is the world price for sugar, and that is the U.S. price. We can see demonstrated very graphically--no pun intended--that we in America are paying almost twice what the world price is for sugar. It also costs us about 20,000 jobs every year.…”