Jeff Merkley

This bill, obviously, is going to be very important to Oregon as to the other 50 States.

I will try to dive into it a little more and follow up with your team, and thank you very much.

I think I have a ways to go to see the Fed as the right place to set capital adequacy rules.

I would like to praise the plan that you put forward, and three things that I had been advocating for were in the plan.

From Oregon's perspective, you all constitute the livability dream team.

I have always been curious as to why all these bills pending in the Congress or about to be introduced haven't included funding for a public education campaign frankly along the lines that John F. Kennedy had in terms of educating people…

Senator, there are other countries that address this issue through basic public health programs.

The fact that a dietician can be as important as a heart surgeon, that a social worker working to prevent a re-admission, a second heart attack, might be as important as the medical care inside the hospital.

Sometimes I feel like we lose common sense along the way.

Somehow we have to get over the hill here. We have to get into the world where our institutions are really taking seriously the modifications programs.

My support for the second half of the TARP was contingent upon a big chunk of it going to mortgage modification.

If we want to promote homeownership and promote wealth creation in the United States among the public, I think there has to be much more attention given to the structures of those loans.

I think there is a need to reexamine the financing of homeownership in the country.

I think, again, that is one of the issues that we need to really sit down, discuss in earnest and look at all the options.

I thought that should have been our initiative.

We have the Nation's first solar highway, which is utilizing a stretch of right-of-way to produce energy and feed it directly into the grid.

One of the ideas that have pursued in Oregon is we have dedicated 1 percent of our State Highway Funds to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

Anytime that type of robust praise gets expressed, I want to feed it back.

I think that would be quite useful.

So I would have assumed that during this downturn, the number of backlogged orders would have dropped dramatically. Am I correct about that?

I am listening to this conversation as the son of a mechanic and machinist who--I had the privilege of growing up building things in the garage.

It is a pleasure to have you, Administrator Jackson, and the work you are doing.

I believe that the market-based approach is not a completely new invention.

There is a lot of work to be done and we are under difficult circumstances with the budget we face.

I think that housing is the foundation of the American dream.