Political Quotes

“I join my colleagues in talking about the challenge that is faced by America's working families. Back home in Oregon, our economy has been hit pretty hard. We have a timber industry, and when you aren't building houses across the country, then you can't sell lumber. So we have mills going out of business across the State of Oregon and a lot of people unemployed--a lot of unemployed people who would be working in the woods cutting down the trees as well as working in the mills. Then we have the challenge of our manufacturing industry that has been hit pretty hard too. We build a lot of RVs and light planes, and those products aren't selling too well in this recession. We have a fruit industry and we have a Christmas tree industry. We ship a lot of that overseas, but the foreign demand is down, and domestic demand is down as well. We have those Mexican tariffs that have been applied to Christmas trees and fruit as well, which has had a pretty strong impact. You pile up all of this on a State that is on the Pacific Rim and add to that the fact that the entire Pacific Rim economy is depressed, and you have a State that not so long ago was second in the Nation only to Michigan in terms of unemployment. Well, things have improved a little in Oregon. We are no longer second worst, partly because many other States have continued to get worse. We are at about 11 percent. That is just about twice the unemployment we had not so long ago.”