Political Quotes

“just a few minutes ago, I was presiding over the Senate and I heard remarks from my friend, the senior Senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill, who sits next to me. I was intrigued by her response to the vote that had just taken place for my colleagues who preach every day about deficit reduction. As Senator McCaskill said, they had an opportunity to pick the lowest hanging fruit there is, take away the tax breaks and the tax dollar subsidies that go to the oil interests in this country. Think about that. We are giving incentives. Taxpayers are spending hard-earned dollars coming from workers in Dayton and Springfield and Akron and Canton that go directly to the most profitable industry in the history of the world, perhaps, particularly the big five oil companies, making billions and billions of dollars. Yet we are simply saying it is OK to give them those kinds of tax breaks and tax subsidies. That is even putting aside the fact that every time there is a pipeline outage or every time there is a fire in a refinery or every time there is turmoil in the Middle East, the oil companies and the speculators use it as a chance to spike up oil prices. They do it over and over like clockwork. A problem in Iran? Prices go up. A fire in a refinery? Prices go up. An outage in a pipeline? Prices go up.…”