Political Quotes

“I think it was good legislation, we are working on it now, but it affected poor people. There is one type of welfare that we have hardly touched in that Congress or this Congress and that is something called corporate welfare. Now corporate welfare affects the powerful, it affects the wealthy. We have hardly touched it. One particularly egregious type of corporate welfare in my opinion is something called the market access program. Now some of the folks on the other side on this issue will argue that it was reformed. This is a program where we spend $90 million a year in taxpayer money to advertise products overseas for trade associations and essentially for corporations. Now the folks who favor this will say, well, we reformed it already, and basically what was done is we changed the name of it from the market promotion program to the market access program. Big deal. That is essentially the reform that we did in the last Congress. I mean, should corporations advertise their products overseas to promote trade? Of course they should. But who should pay for it; the taxpayers or the corporations and the trade associations that benefit? I would argue not the taxpayers, but the people who benefit, the corporations themselves, ought to pay for this.”