Political Quotes

“Just to reiterate the point made by the gentleman from Pennsylvania, the Farm Credit System is a very important thing for rural America. It provides credit to America's farmers and ranchers and is a necessary and serious challenge to get that credit sometimes. There have been times when business has been bad in rural America, and the Farm Credit System has been there to stand up in good times and bad. I appreciate the concerns raised by my friends in the banking community. We want to make sure that there is fair treatment, given that these are two different types of systems that operate, and we have listened to them very carefully. We have held hearings. And as the gentleman from Pennsylvania says, we worked very hard to come up with something we thought was fair. We did basically three things: One related to housing, one related to lending in the energy area, and one dealing with cooperatives. All of these things are simply looking to modernize the Farm Credit System to deal with the fact that rural America and farming have changed substantially from the last time there was any major address of this issue back in the 1970s.”