Speeches

The subcommittee sits today to hear two bills, one removing government impediments to development of one of the cheapest and cleanest forms of electricity generation and one proposing more government subsidies for one of the most expensive forms of water delivery.

I thank the gentleman (Mr. Ryan) for yielding and I thank him for his vision and courage. It has truly been an honor to serve on this committee under his leadership. Mr. Chairman, a year ago, the House passed a budget that would have put our nation back on the path to fiscal solvency and ultimately paid off the entire national debt. It would have saved Medicare and Medicaid from collapse and put them back on a solid and secure foundation.

The House is about to consider a budget in a dangerous hour in the life of our country. Last year, we barreled past several urgent warning signals: the loss of our nation's triple-A credit rating; the size of the national debt surpassing our entire economy; a record third year of trillion dollar-plus annual deficits.

This nation is on a collision course with a sovereign debt crisis the magnitude of which we have never experienced. This is not some moonless night on the Atlantic. We are spending full speed ahead toward that iceberg of debt in the full light of day and we can all see it plainly.

The reason these times are so impassioned is because we have arrived at a moment when two very different visions of society are competing for our nation’s future, and they are very much reflected in the budgets put forward by the two parties in this House.

This year, we must produce legislation to remove the regulatory obstacles that are pointlessly and artificially making new water and power projects cost prohibitive. We must re-establish a practical structure to finance and approve those projects that meet clear and uniform cost-benefit analysis and that are paid for by the actual beneficiaries of these projects and not by general taxpayers.

In 2009 and 2010, hundreds of billions of gallons of contracted water were diverted away from California farms and instead dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the name of the Delta Smelt. This tragic policy fallowed hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the most fertile and productive farmland in America. It threw thousands of hard-working families into unemployment.

I remember when we met here in Auburn in April of 2010 under imminent threat of closure, all the "experts" said that the only way to keep the Auburn Project Area lands open would be with massive federal earmarks. I am pleased to note that today's announcement is the result not of federal earmarks, but rather of re-ordering federal priorities