Joe Barton

The proposal that the industry and your department have agreed to doubles the user fees per year for the next, I think, 4 or 5 years.

I think it is better to have a third-party review than to have it sit on a bureaucrat's desk at the FDA and not get reviewed at all, but that is just me.

I am extremely glad that you are holding this hearing but don't ask this member to rubberstamp a doubling of a user fee.

I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but every now and then I am.

In the new health care law that passed several years ago, there is a 2.3 percent tax on medical device companies, and it is expected to raise $20 billion over the next 10 years.

It is absolutely imperative, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Eshoo, that we really take this seriously.

The very economy that was established for us by the Federal Government is now under threat by the Federal Government.

The impact on mercury emissions is going to be so negligible that it will not have a measurable impact.

I mean, you are the only toxicologist on the panel here.

Amen. We all want to work together.

Well, you can't name it because it doesn't exist.

When you talk in your--I don't know if you talked in your testimony, but you gave us in an answer to a question, you just said that--you used the phrase 'real people.'

Isn't it true that you get almost no health benefit from the reduction--the new standards for mercury reduction?

Mr. Chairman, could I defer at this point in time and let one of the other members who has been here ask questions?

I think, Mr. Chairman, that it is time for us now to try to deal--first of all, we have got to admit that we are a schizophrenic committee...

I think that these companies who did not take--see the writing on the wall, did not take this Congress seriously...

If the answer to our economic problem is more regulation so that we get more people hired for compliance, we could go out and start hiring people to go rob banks.

The more regulation you have, the more compliance cost you are going to have, but you are going to have to hire people, but they don't produce anything.

This Utility MACT rule is the most expensive regulation that has ever been proposed on the American economy.

I do appreciate you for holding this hearing, you and Mr. Green, on the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standard Program.

I want to pick your two gentlemen's brains on this consent-based approach that you talk about in your recommendations.

My time is expired. Mr. Chairman, I have one more question.

I think that is inexcusable.

But we fought and won World War II in less time than it has taken so far to evaluate this project.

So those socioeconomic factors might be the reason that until the radical environmentalists begin to protest...