Political Quotes

“Amendment No. 220 is about making sure we don't send good money after bad. When you go to the pump today to buy gasoline that is blended with ethanol, you pay, as a taxpayer, $1.78. As a taxpayer, you pay that before you ever pay the $3.51 we are paying per gallon, through incentives, tax credits, and rebates for ethanol and blending. This doesn't take away incentives on corn-based ethanol. It says that because we already have a mandate that says 15 billion gallons of ethanol must be available and put through the system this year, no longer is there a necessity to have a blender's credit to the tune of $6 billion a year. So what this does is two things: One, it takes away an incentive that is no longer needed because we have already mandated the ethanol will be there. But it saves us $6 billion that we are paying to firms that are going to do the business whether we pay it or not. So it is silly to continue to spend $6 billion of American taxpayer money of which almost $3 billion of it will be borrowed money from either the Federal Reserve or from the Chinese to incentivize something that is already mandated to happen. If we look at ethanol, it is two-thirds as efficient when blended as gasoline. It gets poorer mileage, and there is no savings in terms of carbon output or pollution. So we are incentivizing the use of a fuel that goes against what most people would like to do environmentally.…”