Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, one of the points that I want to make, and I am not in the habit of speaking when I know a point of order is going to be made against legislation, but here is what we face: for instance, Bethlehem Steel has 18 retirees for every person working. Bethlehem's pension cost is going to be at least $2 billion over a period of time if they go chapter 7. Now, who picks that up? The PBGC picks it up. We set up the PBGC in order to protect what we thought would be garment factories going out of work. We only pay 80 percent of the pension costs. We pay none of the health care costs. Right now all of those retirees are being paid by Bethlehem Steel. We have the same problem with LTV and all these other companies that have retirees that do not have full funding for the pension guarantee in their fund. So we are going to have to face this. We did it for the coal miners, for the health care costs for the coal miners, and we are going to have to look at some way to take care of these pensioners. All of us have retired steelworkers. We have them from Pennsylvania that move to Florida, we have them in California, we have them all over the country. If we do not, we are going to have thousands of steelworkers getting 80 percent of their pension and losing their health care costs completely. So I hope that when we go to conference we will look at the possibility of finding a way to fund some of these corporations out of the tariffs.”