David Thomas: “I rise to support this disaster assistance, one of the things that is most important for us to deal with in the area I…”

“I rise to support this disaster assistance, one of the things that is most important for us to deal with in the area I come from. I thank the chairman of the committee for putting this bill forward and going back and making it fit the need. We have to send relief to people who have had real disasters. I thank also the Democrat leader for his work. He has worked on it for some time. We do need, of course, to have balance in our spending. We need to have some control. We know that. We have to be reasonable about how we do that. In Wyoming, this is probably the third year of drought. Fortunately, up until this last year, we generally had runoff and the irrigating systems worked reasonably well. This year that is less the case. We do not have the kind of storage we have had in the past. We need to deal with this issue. In Wyoming, livestock is at least equally important as the crops. We need to adjust that, which has been done here, to make sure livestock is recognized as well. We have had natural disasters throughout the country. We have had tax relief. That is good. But in many cases tax relief is not sufficient because there is no income to tax. We had a farm bill this year which changed things. We had an unworkable insurance program. We need to do something about that so it does work. We also now have a farm program that is based on loans for crops. If you do not have a crop, you do not benefit from the farm program. That has been difficult.”