Jeff Merkley

We need to do more, not less.

The owner of the mill said, and I believe I have this right, that it's like a person starving to death in a room full of food.

A lot of our private landholders are very concerned about forest fires that are moving from public land onto their private land.

This is an effort to address a significant area in southern Oregon, where you have a complicated set of rivers and dams and species.

This is a provision based on a law that we adopted in Oregon when I was Speaker that worked incredibly well.

I believe that the President's request is $350 million, if the numbers I have are right.

I just want to note that a 'for example' is that we spend $80 billion-plus in the home mortgage interest deduction to promote homeownership, but almost none of that goes to lower income families buying starter homes.

This is really a strategy that gets people started in homeownership which has a huge impact on the success of families.

The fiscal year 2013 enacted amount was $682 million, so roughly a 50-percent decrease in those block grants.

It's one of those things that doesn't cost much, and actually the businesses are very happy.

We are doing a poorer job of providing education to our children than our parents did for us. And that is completely unacceptable.

Have decreased significantly--longer breaks, more half-days, more full days.

I wanted to turn in my last 50 seconds to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) reorganization.

This is how you will be able to go.

Are school fees for participation in extracurricular activities a problem in our system?

So I wish we had the luxury of just doing one thing for a couple of years. We don't have that luxury.

I am not sure how a borrower who gets $1,000 relief would feel they had gotten $500,000 of relief.

I am afraid I cannot answer it. It would be a good question to ask them to explain.

Now, I live in a working class neighborhood, three-bedroom ranch houses. There are no $500,000 mortgages where I live because there are no $500,000 houses.

I would be interested in pursuing this in partnership with you, that we should ask for such data to be part of this process for at least evaluation, looking back at what worked and what did not.

Well, I would just like to point out that the roughly $6 billion in soft money that is in the settlement, at that 500-to-one rate, that is reduced down to $12 million.

I hope the EPA will work very hard to utilize that close partnership.

$8,000 in fuel savings per vehicle, saving families $1.7 trillion at the pump.

I really do appreciate an important decision that was made under your direction for a 3-year deferral on biogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

My goal is that we bring this scientific information to bear so we don't put very different types of products into the same basket.