Political Quotes

“A thoughtful and detailed article appeared about a week ago in the Portland Oregonian indicating public expenditures of close to $1 billion during the current year directed at the recovery of salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. That is an extraordinarily large amount of money for a purpose of that nature. A modest portion of it comes from State appropriations of the four States in the Columbia River drainage area. The largest single share of that almost $1 billion is paid for through the charges for electric power produced by the Bonneville Power Administration and others, and, therefore, by the residents of the region, but a very substantial share of that money comes from appropriations approved by this Congress. As recently as 1 year or 18 months ago, I and many others in the region were critical of the billions of dollars of spending for this purpose on the grounds that they had shown few, if any results, and that, in fact, salmon runs had declined during that period of time. That criticism is no longer entirely correct. We have had some recent successes, and I will mention a few of them in just a moment. But I think all would agree that those successes are not at this point a proper return on an investment of almost $1 billion a year.”