Political Quotes

“I rise in strong support of the proposal by our Democratic leader. We all know that sequestration was a blunt instrument, and now it is beginning to hurt. There is delay after delay at airports throughout the Nation. This is not only a question of traveler inconvenience. Our economy in all likelihood will lose many more dollars in the next week or two than it costs to furlough the air traffic controllers when businesspeople can't travel, when tourists can't travel. I know my home city of New York is greatly affected. No one stays in the hotels, no one dines in restaurants, and no one attends the shows. This may be repeated in destination after destination throughout the country. If people are so uncertain of air travel that when they show up at the airport, they may wait 1 hour or they may wait 5 hours, they won't go. A good percentage will stop their trips. So it doesn't make sense to go forward. I think we are in agreement. The problem is, how do we fix it? There aren't many ways to fix it because if you simply say, give flexibility, the Transportation Department has very little flexibility because many of its funds are off limits. The highway trust fund, for instance, isn't affected by sequestration because those are our nickels and dimes that go into the gas tax per gallon, which wasn't affected by sequestration. An extremely high and disproportionate number of the Transportation Department's expenditures are air traffic controllers themselves. We have this problem.…”