Political Quotes

“I think I can clarify it. The opposition is we are doing it abruptly rather than over a period of time and not allowing people to plan for the elimination of this. Those are the arguments I hear. The fact is, this is just one of a series of things we do for ethanol. I am not going after ethanol. I am going after saving money for our country that is being spent. We have a mandate that says the country has to buy a specific amount of ethanol. Before we had that mandate, a blenders' credit was a smart thing to do if you believed that ethanol was a way to solve our problems. But the fact is, we now have a mandate that they have to produce it. It is going to 15 billion gallons a year. I can give you the exact numbers in terms of what we produce. But because we have a blenders' credit, last year we produced 397 million gallons more and we exported it to Europe. So the American people subsidized $200 million worth of ethanol consumption in Europe through these blenders' credits. We are not going after all the other loans, the loan programs, all the other energy grants and everything else. We are not doing any of that. All we are saying is here is a simple thing that is no longer needed; 86 percent of the ethanol production is by majors, not small ethanol plants. They do not want this money, they do not need this money to blend ethanol because there is already a mandate there requiring it.…”