Sherrod Brown

I know we can't un-ring that bell, but I've continued to ring the alarm that we need a better PBGC.

I won't support pension legislation unless it does that. We need any relief to be targeted, timely and temporary.

We cannot bail out an industry while leaving thousands of retirees who have loyally served it out in the cold.

For many workers and retirees in Ohio and across the Nation, there is a crisis of confidence in our social contract.

Every one of them had been with that company for 30 years. For every one of them, their situation is not what was promised to them during their work lives.

I would also like to thank my Senator, Sherrod Brown, for the interest and concerns and efforts he has put forward on our behalf.

Protecting retirement security was one of the purposes of the bailout of our financial system.

This committee doesn't work on pensions to score political points. We do so because we all have citizens in our States who need us to fight for the retirement benefits they have earned.

The Federal Government stepped in to bail out the auto industry.

I want to thank the Chairman for his leadership on the wide range of legislation we are discussing today.

Over and over, the discussion turned to they cannot get credit.

Scientific certainty should not trump human decency.

Do we save a few bucks or do we save a few lives?

When there is doubt, we must take the side of the servicemember.

We must cut through the bureaucracy and focus on delivering both help and hope to men and women and their families who served our Nation.

We should all be outraged by the behavior of KBR and like-minded contractors who take the money from our taxpayers.

I hear consistently, as we all do, from particularly small and medium-sized businesses about the difficulty of getting credit.

I really do believe that if we had not done a lot of things we did, contrary to what some in my State and some in the Senate and House think, it would have been significantly worse.

The VA is firing many of its blue collar workers, and replacing them with private contractors without going through the competition process that Congress has called for again and again.

Trust in the VA is eroded when a complicated, subjective formula spits out a rating and a dollar amount.

By providing a fully-integrated system from the Veterans Health Administration to the Veterans Benefits Administration, we could make VA run more efficiently.

The system must be designed to maximize earned benefits for veterans, not to minimize compensation awards.

A service-connected disability should be rated the same whether the veteran is in Dayton, Ohio, or Daytona Beach, Florida.

Any change to the system must make it more fair.

Transparency must be an overarching goal.