Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I would say first of all, whether that is good policy--I think you have to have the accurate input before you make a policy determination. The oil and gas industry is very complicated. In order for them to go out and risk their capital, they have to plow this money back in. Frankly, most of it is plowed back into exploration. What I wanted to get across, which I think is important, is that the Sanders amendment repeals three things--first of all, expensing for intangible drilling costs; that is IDC. It repeals percentage depletion for marginal oil and gas wells. It repeals the manufacturing deduction for oil and gas. I predicted a long time ago, when the gulf spill took place, that people were going to try to parlay this into something to punish oil and gas. This is what they have been trying to do for a long time. It could very well be that tonight, when the President makes his big speech, he is going to talk about, now we are going to have to look at cap and trade, as if there is some relationship between what happened in the gulf and cap and trade. Repealing expensing of intangible drilling costs eliminates the ability to expense intangible drilling and development costs, which would force at least a 25- to 30-percent reduction in drilling budgets, leading to lost jobs, lost production, and higher prices to consumers. On the floor of the Senate yesterday, I spent some time talking about how many jobs actually would be lost in the State of Louisiana.…”