David Obey: “We need to know what is happening with production changes. And the effect that this bill has on our ability to know all…”

“We need to know what is happening with production changes. And the effect that this bill has on our ability to know all of that is decimated because we are cutting the budgets of the agencies that do the statistical analysis to tell us what is really happening. Just one question for example: How do we really tell the price of a product when the nature of that product is being changed every 3 months, as computers are, for instance? The second thing I would like to say is that the fundamental right of any business in an economy is a free marketplace. That is as important to each and every business as the Bill of Rights is to every individual in this country. And yet at the very time that this economy is creating tremendous opportunities, it is also creating tremendous possibilities for anti-competitive practices to go unpunished and unregulated in the marketplace. And this bill makes that problem worse because it cuts the funds that are needed to police the anti-competitive practices of many of those corporations, including, just for one example, the oil companies, which are the subject of so much suspicion today. We have one more challenge; that is the challenge of globalization. How do we compete with countries with different cultures, different economies, and a different understanding about what the rules of the game ought to be?”