Mike Conaway (U.S. Representative, MA)

After the vote, all the Democrats were shaking hands and patting each other on the shoulder. You made various points on why you didn’t think Waxman-Markey was such a great bill. What are the main three reasons you felt that way?

Well, I’d probably make the same reference to an old movie title, A Bad Day at Black Rock. It has nothing to do with what’s happening on the floor, just a great line, that it’s a bad day for America. This bill with increase the cost of energy. The president said it himself. Your electricity with necessarily will skyrocket. Both of those are his words. It restricts access to the energy we need right now. It does not promote the two main sources of energy that we ought to be going after very aggressively.

And that’s nuclear power and clean-burning coal. So, it’s interesting that they would focus, the way they’ve done, on ways to generate electricity that are at the margins of the grid. No one rationally expects that wind and silver will the backbone of the electrical grid in this country. And that should be nuclear power and clean-burning coal.

And then again, it sounds like you’ll have the same comment about the two bills, the one HR5351, you voted no on. Why did you vote no on that?

Well, it doesn’t make, that’s a false choice, between tax breaks for one and increased taxes on the other part of the industry. Those resources, coming out of the oil and gas business, would have been resources that would have been used to drill additional wells to the United States provides additional U.S.-based oil and gas production and energy as well as worldwide. So, to me, that’s a false choice, to say, oh, this restricted development of energy that we currently use every single day, and put it in these other areas.

So, not against the other areas. I’m just not a guy who’s gonna increase taxes on one segment, whatever the industry is, in order to pay for something else that where government’s making the selection as to who the winner is and who’s the loser. The federal government does a rotten job of picking winners and losers. We’re just awful at it. Maybe because it’s not our money. I came out of the private sector, and folks who make the best decisions are the one who have their own money up. They do the due diligence and the homework to make sure it works. Take those risks.

Hopefully get those rewards that are associated with the ones that work, and they serve the consequences of those that don’t. Government selectors, pickers, have none of the discipline. And we just make rotten choices.

The government’s done a lot to boost fossil fuels.

The percentage to [unintelligible] allowance and immediate deduction of IDCs are important tax planning tools that those who take the risks of drilling for oil and gas and developing coal resources have used to enhance their cash flows, which allows them to take greater risks than they would otherwise been able to take. So, as a result, we have abundant supplies of natural gas. We are finding more oil and trying to help replace the oil that we’re actually using.

So, let’s hamper that. Let’s raise the cost of gasoline. Let’s raise the cost of natural gas, electricity that’s a generator of natural gas. Arbitrarily and capricious, it makes no sense. So, and put it in technologies that, until we learn how to store electricity at scope, are always gonna be at the margin, wind energy, as an example. My district, or Randy [unintelligible]’s district, are 1 and 2, or 2 and 1, on electricity generated with wind power.

So, I’ve got either the first or second largest district in the United States generating wind power. If the wind doesn’t blow, the wind mills just sit there, and so, but the people wanna turn their lights on whether the wind’s blowing or not. So, until that technology’s, then those are alternatives where there’s solar or wind shouldn’t be the main focus of what we’re trying to do. Costs are high. The manufacturing industry in this country, whatever it might be, uses electricity.

As we compete against other countries for production of whatever. Caterpillar trucks or dozers or whatever, we will always have a competitive disadvantage with respect to wages. Americans will make more than the equivalent worker in some other country. That’s a deal that’s not gonna stop, not gonna change. We just have to manage around that. There’s no reason that American businesses should have to manage extra energy costs at the same time.

So, if a Chinese company is using electricity that costs something, our manufacturing in the United States ought to have as close to an equivalent amount of cost and energy as they possibly can, so they can be competitive. Because they’ve got an uphill struggle with the labor wages that are gonna inherent in anything made in America. So, both of those bills would have the impact of increasing energy costs, particularly the time when we’re coming out of a recession. Those time those bills were up, we were on the leading edge, or just in it, the recession.

And, to come out of a recession, you don’t do a couple things. You don’t raise taxes. And you don’t arbitrarily energy costs or manufacturing costs on businesses if you want those businesses to instead take that money and hire people. Or build things to improve their plants, which then hires folks to help them build those things.

I’m gonna refer to them as the Barbara Boxer camp. What’s your take on their thing, that basically this bill that passed is gonna create its own economic boost?

Sure. Let me give you an example in West Texas. During the setup phase of these wind towers, there were a lot of jobs created. Guys out there pushing dirt around to create the base. They’d come out and they’d pour the concrete and they’d set it up, and the guy that’s running the big winch or the big crane that lifts it up. There are a lot of jobs there. Once those guys leave, then it takes very few people to manage the operations. And the manufacturers of the turbines have done such a good job that there’s very little maintenance on those.

So, there is some initial flush of jobs, but they quickly go away. Spain’s an example with their initiative on solar power. Remember in 1997, they began a full-blown attempt to go to solar. They embraced solar. Their experience after 10 years was that, for every 10 jobs created during that time frame, only one was a permanent job. Also, because they were increased their cost of electricity, for each created, it cost two other jobs that went away because of the higher cost.

So, yes, you can look at isolation and say, “Okay, we’re gonna create a few jobs here while we’re setting up these wind towers, or a few jobs over in California where we’re setting up the solar rays,” but going forward, they’re just not that many jobs involved, and it actually cost us jobs if our electricity costs go up and become less competitive, then it’s overall a job loser, when you look at it in the broader scheme of what’s happening.

Over at NRDC, they’re probably going to talk about the urgency of shifting our energy path toward renewables and there’s gonna be some winners and losers in that transition. What’s your take on this urgency that NRDC and the Barbara Boxer camp has? Where’s the urgency?

Well, I think it’s a false urgency. It’s a made-up urgency in order to try to scare people into doing something they might not otherwise do. We’ve already seen, over the last three or four weeks some question about the data that’s being used to drive the climate change models that were there. If you look at the models that they have in place — there are 21 of them that the IPCC has put together — they are spectacularly intricate. They are complicated. They are based upon reactions of reactions to reactions to reactions, formulas that just look spectacular on paper and give you a false sense of legitimacy.

If you chart those guesses as to what Earth’s temperature will be over a 75-year time frame, you’ve got a high and a low and the other 19 or in between those. Start that track in 2000. You’ve got it coming across, they begin to spread out, and then you get out here 40 or 50 years, 50 years, and then they go straight up, kinda hockey-stick-lookin’ thing. If you go back, then, and plot America’s or the world’s actual temperature from 2000 to today, it’s below the bottom estimate and falling away from their track.

So, what the argument would be is that look, these things didn’t get it right the first nine years. Somehow, there’s a self-correcting mechanism somewhere out there in the future that needs to rely on that data and it feels that sense of urgency. So, most projections, in fact all projections, are the most accurate in the near term. If we’re this financial projection of whatever. And if not getting around in the near time, you gotta question the issue. So, now we’ve seen the data’s going bad. And the other issue is that we all want to breathe clean air.

We all want to drink clean water. God has put us on this Earth as a syteward of all of these resources, and we ought to manage them and use them effectively and well. And most folks would agree where we want to get to, but where we’re starting from, there is a lengthy period to make that happen. And what that crowd would say, or not say, is they simply ignore between now and then. And they wanna get to this utopia out there, and it costs a lot of money to get there. What we’re saying on our side is let’s manage that correctly. Let’s rely more on the private sector to make that happen.

If we are going to be relying on American-sourced energy, like nuclear and coal, let’s do that. That makes America a more strategically safe country than if we’re importing. If we’re importing crude oil to the extent that we are, why does it not make sense to substitute that imported crude oil for oil produced here in America, so that we’re not giving our dollar to someone who uses them for uses that we don’t like. We don’t want them to use Hugo Chavez or others.

So, this is a false sense of urgency. It’s a tactic that we all use from time from time when we’re trying to promote and convince people that we are correct. But, climates change. I live in a part of the world that was an ocean. The Permian Sea. Something happened to the climate that now allows me to walk freely across that once sea floor without scuba gear.

And man wasn’t around when that change occurred. So, climates change. Yes, that happens. Whether it’s made change has yet to be determined. The other thing they’ve not established is causation. Just because something correlates does not mean there’s a causation relationship between the two. If you looked at temperatures, you might say, “Oh, postal rates correlate with some number.” Does it mean that the postal rates caused that? Not likely. So, the causation is what’s missing, but, you know, there may be some things that correlate, and so the proponents would argue that, the science is settled, that there’s no additional need for continuing to question.

Let me throw one other thing at you. Galileo, and I know you thought about Galileo this morning. I get up every day and think, “I wonder what Galileo is doing to…” Galileo was one of the preeminent scientists of his era, the only one that’s generally recognized in the general public. Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest because the Roman Catholic church was offended that he said, “Rather than the Earth being the center of the universe,” which was the consensus, settled science of his time, Galileo boldly said, “No, the sun is the center of the universe,” a dramatic difference.

Now, you and I both know that Washington, D.C., is the center of the universe, but that’s a different argument. So, who are the Galileo’s today? And where are all those skeptics? Because the scientific model really only works if the scientists themselves continue to question what they know. You can look across all of history, where scientists settled the Earth is flat, Christopher Columbus said, “Well, it might not be. It might be a round deal.” And so, science is only valuable to us if it continues to question itself, and climate change is one of those, particularly man-made climate change, is one of those arenas where to be fair to everybody, we oughta question all of those assumptions.

Well, now to the more civic side of things. Do you feel like all the various stakeholders across the energy industry, as well as manufacturing, the environmental crowd, is everyone got a seat at the table?

Oh, yeah, just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I would argue that no, that those most affected did not have a seat at the table. The ad committee, for example, one of the committees I do serve on has a piece of this thing and we didn’t even mark it up. We just discharged it. So, I’m sure you’re gonna find folks who thought they weren’t listened to or their opinions weren’t seen. If you look at the final product, I guess the best way to judge, and the final product is very heavily leaning or biased toward an arena that says that nuclear power folks weren’t talked to.

The coal folks weren’t talked to or weren’t listened to. Oil and gas certainly were not listened to. So, look at the end product and make the judgments yourself, because everybody’s gonna have a different take on whether or not, you know, my two cents got on the table.

A lot of watchdog groups are saying that around this bill, there’s record spending on the lobbying side, from all parties. Does this stuff have an impact in terms of how policy is made?

You know, I don’t think so. I know the watchdog groups would argue differently. But no one group can give me enough money that it would make sense, you know, 2000, 2500, 500, whatever it is, or any member of Congress. To sway their opinion, I don’t think. Now, they’re-we’ve have some notable examples where guys had a list and here’s, you know, this tit-for-tat kind of thing, but just the day-in-and-day-out, you know, if I’m talking to some group, I honestly can’t tell you without being reminded or looking at a list if whether or not they gave me any money or whether or not or how much.

Or whether they gave me this cycle, last cycle, those kinds of things. So, at least for me, and I can’t speak for the other, you know, 5,354 folks who are in that predicament. There’s a real detachment in my functioning between the money I have to raise to try to get reelected and the policy work that I do here. Like I said, it’d probably get me in trouble with the folk who do give me money that I make those statements, but I treat everybody the same, whether they give me money or not. In terms of access to me and access to my staff and those kinds of things.

So, at least for my shop, it really doesn’t have an impact. I know there’s some folks who can try to craft an argument that says that. But you might as them, is their integrity for sale? For those individually sized numbers. And they would argue, “No, it’s not,” and my next question would be “Then why do you think mine is?”

Lobbyists, contributors to your campaign, they’re not having any more access than anyone else?

No, because I serve the ad committee, I meet with ad groups, and the ad groups are more likely than not to give to my campaigns on the other side. So, we’ll meet with anybody who wants to, that we can, where can schedule it, my staff or I. If I’m working on an issue, and it’s important to the folks in district 11 or important to this country, I will meet with anybody who has good ideas or anybody who has a thought about how we ought to arrange those kinds of things, because, you know, at the end of the day, that’s the work product of Congress, are these bills that we pass.

And the impact that we have on America and the world. So, that’s far more important than any single donor or whatever that might go on. But I’ve been here five years, again, the critics would go, “Well, he’s just blowing his own horn.” But, I started here five years ago, saying, “I wanna meet the folks first. The money will figure itself out.” And so, I spent an awful lot of time having breakfasts and lunches and just one-on-ones with the folks who represent the ad people.

The folks who represent Armed Services guys, and a variety of people, just to try and build a relationship with them, so I knew who they were and they knew who I was, because I felt that was long-term gonna be a better way than just this dramatic money chase that the rest of the world thinks we’re constantly on.

So, is that a misperception, this money chase? We’ve talked with other members of Congress that are complaining about the money chase, and they hate it. Is that not your experience?

Yeah, that’s the one piece – I love this job. This is the best job I’ve ever had, except for that. You know, it’s a hassle. I used to be an auditor. And auditors had to do voucher exams. There is nothing more boring than a voucher exam, but you gotta do it. And I put raising money in the same category. My CPA auditors buddies out there will know exactly what I’m talking about the voucher exam thing. But, it’s a part of the job, and we spend a lot of time at it. It’s unfortunate.

I don’t know any other way around it. Taxpayers, finance campaigns is a wreck. We should not do that. So, it’s an important way to continue to get our message out. But it comes with the territory, comes with the job. Every member, or every candidate, who raises their hands knows they have to do it. So, they’re informed consumers. None of us, I think, well, maybe a few guys enjoy that quest. I do it in order a necessary evil. But I don’t know anybody that really truly enjoys asking other folks to take their after-tax dollars, give it to me so that I can pursue my dream.

That was the toughest thing for me to overcome. Now, my history, before I came to Congress, is I raised a lot of money for the United Way and the Salvation Army and all these charitable organizations. It didn’t bother me at all to raise money for Boy Scouts or whatever it was, because that wasn’t me. I was doing this because there is a greater deal. To run for Congress, you have to ask people to take their after-tax dollars to help you fulfill your dream. It may help them, it may not. But it gets me what I’m trying to get to, and that was a spectacularly difficult thing to overcome.

When I first started running. I still don’t like it. I need to do more of it. Whenever something about the job comes up that overlaps with my time I’ve got scheduled to go across the street and dial for money, it’s very easy for me to do the job and avoid going across the street to dial for money. But I’m blessed with a district that’s not an essential to stay on the job, ’cause it’s a heavily Republican district, and so, a primary challenge is a different animal than a general election challenge in November.

You’re saying that this public funding idea is a train wreck. Why do you feel that way?

Getting this job ought to be hard. These are really, really good jobs, and it ought to be spectacularly difficult to get them. And one of the ways than you could gain, that you elicit solid support for your position, your campaign, is to get people to give you money. ’Cause they’ll say they’ll vote for you or whatever, and votes are an easy deal. But if you can actually get them to write you a check, then they will go vote for you. And so, I just think we lose a discipline of candidate vetting when, if everybody gets a certain amount of money, then it’s much more of a beauty contest than anything else.

And that’s not really how you oughta get these jobs. It oughta be hard. It oughta be very difficult to get them, and to keep them, because being in the house, we run up, up on the ballot every two years. I run for re-election all the time. It’s never at the back of my mind, that I need to go meet as many people today, when I’m home in the district, as I possibly can. Not to get their vote, but just to prove to them that I’m earning their vote come November, come March or whatever.

And you just add it all the time. So, I just think there’s a discipline associated with raising the money piece of it that, is important. And, we don’t need to be taking tax-I mean right now, we got a precious few tax dollar. And, they’re going to a lot of places they shouldn’t go. We are $12 trillion in debt. I’ve got pieces of legislation each time I’ve been in that say, “Oh, we’re not gonna create any new programs unless we cut an existing program of an equivalent amount or more.” Actually force us to make some priority changes.

So, in the grand scheme of things, this issue would be of a spectacular low priority for me, as well as just the false idea that you should be adding new promises, whether new spending, whether it’s the health care new entitlement that’s coming around the corner or capping tax, whatever it might be at a point in time when our nation is in as dire financial circumstances as we find ourselves.

The people that are promoting public funding are saying that less than 1 percent of American citizens give more than $200 per election to any political candidate. As a result, they’re saying that most of the money that’s going to finance campaigns on the federal level is coming from sources that are deep-pocker, as relative to average American, and it leaves the vast majority being under-represented. So, on the on hand, you’re saying it should be hard work.

Well, I want folks who have ambition in these jobs. I want folks who have been successful at other things in these jobs. I want people who have proven themselves across a broad array of experiences to be in these jobs. Not just in business. I would skew it toward business versus lawyers and some of the other professions that are overrepresented, so to speak, in the mix.

And those folks typically, have been somewhat successful, and they have people who know them as that success. I build a reputation in West Texas because I did things that showed that part of the world that I could do some things. So, you know, just somebody who wakes up some morning and says, “Hey, I wanna run for Congress,” and we’ve got some sort of public financing things that allows a broad array of these people to get that, I don’t know that you’ll elect better people for than job than the current system.

The other thing is, there’s actually no barrier to people donating their money to a candidate. Whether it’s $10 – we take all donations of any level. Because I know if somebody gives $25, they’re gonna vote for me. And so, I’m as keenly interested in that constituent as I am the guy that gives me $2400. And I know that those critics would say, “Oh, you’re just saying that ’cause it sounds good.” But, for me, it’s the truth.

And, you can look at what happened to Joe Wilson. When people get their dander up or whatever, Joe’s raised a lot of money, 10, 15, 20, 25 dollars at a time. Here’s the other things about it, it’s only tangentially related. A lot of time is spent whining about voter turnout. My argument is that I only want people who are enagged, who know the candidate, know the issue coming to the polls.

I see no value in sweeping the streets and pushing people into a poll so they go in and mark a ballot willy-nilly and don’t know what they’re doing. That’s not those aren’t the people I want deciding who’s the president of the United Stated, who’s the congressman of District 11, who’s the mayor of Midland, Texas. As long as everybody has the right to vote, then the folks who choose not to vote, that’s fine with me, because what they’re telling those of us who do vote, “I’m giving you my proxy. Get it right.”

And so the folks who do vote are overrepresented in the population from those who don’t. Now, is it dollars that does that, or is it just the folks who have the most interest, in this country and wanna become involved in those things? So, I want informed voters, and I tell this to every high school class I talk to, and I talk to a lot of civics classes in high school. I say, “Look, you’re about to embark on a lifetime of being a responsible voter. Not-” my wife says it this way. “Not voting is dumb. Not being an informed voter is dumber than voting without knowing what your candidates are.”

So, quit wringing your hands about the folks that don’t go vote. If they get mad, if they get fired up about a candidate, as we saw with Obama. A lot of first-time, voters out there, simply because President Obama’s charisma. Got them excited, got them fired up. They came to the polls. And they helped decide who was gonna be the president for the next four years, three years now. So, as long as they got the right to vote, when they get fired up, when they get excited, when they get mad at me, when they get whatever, and become informed and have a reason to go to the polls other than, you know, they just got swept up in a dragnet of folks and pushed into the polls, that’s fine.

How do you think he’s doing, the president?

You know, I don’t think he’s doing very well. His policies. You know, he’s a pretty good guy and, but I disagree with every one of his policies. I was disappointed back in March when one of the first campaign promises that he broke was that he signed that continued resolution, to continue the funding of the government through September 30. That CR, as we say up here, under the inside-the-beltway nonsense should have been extending the funding for those executive branch [unintelligible] for that final seven months based on 2009-or 8 spending levels.

Instead, they had to include a 30 billion-dollar increase. This was money that was gonna get spent over the last six months, seven months. The agencies didn’t know they were gonna get it. The constituent groups didn’t know they were gonna get it. They had just gotten a zillion dollars out of the stimulus. The president coulda looked at peaker Pelosi and-and-and, uh, Leader Reid and said, “Folks, we got tough spending decisions ahead of us. Here’s the first one. I’m gonna veto this bill that’s 30 billion of extra money that doesn’t need to get spent.”

“That’s gonna be my down payment on some really hard choices that we have to make going forward. So, I’m sending this back to you. It’s got a bunch of earmarks in it, and so, you send it back to me squeaky-clean, ’08 levels, and we’ll tell America — and more importantly, we’ll tell the world — that we are actually gonna get out fan-our financial or fiscal house in order.” So, right out of the box, he, you know, blew that. So, his policies, I don’t think I voted for one of them.

Personal basis, I think he’s doing what presidents do, and that is, he makes some of the folks who voted for him mad right off the bat, makes some of those folks happy all the way along, and those of us who didn’t vote for him, you know, we’re gonna disagree anyway. So, you know, that’s the single toughest job, I think, on the face of the Earth, because, you will never be more liked than the first-when you’re first sworn in, and he’s seeing that now, as his overall numbers begin to drop.

What do you think of these earmarks?

Well, the system for earmarks is flawed. But I think the left really benefits by the right’s focus on earmarks, because it distracts us from the more important issue — earmarks are important, don’t get me wrong — but the more important issue of total spending. The way the system works here is that we set a budget in April, and that money’s gonna get spent. It’ll get spent to the nickel, whether there’s one earmark or 50 earmarks in it. The total number doesn’t change. So, all of the earmark stuff churns under that total number.

So, if we’re actually gonna control spending, we’ve gotta at those top-line numbers. And while we continue to focus and beat each other up about the flawed earmark system, it distracts from the bigger picture and the more important picture of total spending. But, you know, we need to make some changes. Having earmarks go through the appropriation subcommittee process, go through the committee process, come to the floor, allow the debate and the amendment process that we’ve been denied this past two years to strip out or highlight those that are embarrassing.

Giving the president line, enhanced decision authority. There are some tools we can do to fix the no airdrop earmarks in [unintelligible] unless it went through committee, it can’t come in a conference. The chairman and the ranking members can’t add these things in at the last minutes. So, there’s some way that I can continue to have input on how, issues are addressed within District 11 that are transparent, everybody knows it, and those kinds of things and still get that done. But at the same time, not distract us from seeing the top-line number, because that’s where the spend if you’re worried about spending, and folks in District 11 are more worried about spending than anything else, then that’s the fight we oughta have.

But we distract ourselves with the earmark fight. As appropriate as it is, it distracts us from the bigger issue, and that is total spending.

You mentioned that there were certain subsidies goes to oil and gas and coal that they need, that they’re taking risks, drilling, whatever. Using that logic, is there ever a good time that subsidies like that should be directed towards renewables? You’re okay with certain subsidies but not for others?

Well, I just don’t think you oughta pay for those other subsidies. Tax credits for the way, for, you know, the producer credits on wind, you don’t finance those by swapping them out, or at least at this stage in the game, I don’t see that win/lose. Let’s figure out a way to do it win/win, so that we continue to produce as much oil and gas as we can to make America as safe as we can in this transitional period. And this transitional period’s gonna last 50, 60, 70 years. We’ll still be using crude oil at the end of my lifetime.

And so, this isn’t an immediate kind of deal to do that. But let’s don’t, I think it’s a false choice to fund the other renewables with off the backs of this deal. Let’s figure out another way to do that. That really reaches another really [unintelligible] altogether, and that’s how we use the tax code itself. It is flawed. The code has, I guess, like 1913, been used to manipulate behavior, give incentives, take incentives away, to manage the economy in ways that the government never gets it right.

We need a better way. I’m a CPA and I spent 30-plus years helping client co-cope, you know, with this code. It’s spectacularly complicated. Some of my colleagues can’t file their own returns right. We all have a scheme, collection scheme, that collects the minimum amount of money needed to fund the federal government. It shouldn’t direct policy. It shouldn’t manipulate people or behaviors or those kinds of things. So, if we got to a better collections scheme, you’d let this development process work on its own with risk-based capital from the private sector deciding, all right, is algae really worth investing in?

Or is wind, or solar, I wanna continue to invest in oil and gas. Everybody’s on the equal playing field at that point in time, and you know, they get taken-having folks take a look at this fair tax or national consumption tax as a better way to go at it than having this current process we have, where you’re constantly picking winners and loser, when you adjust the tax code. Because as I said earlier in the conversation, the federal government does a rotten job of picking winner and losers that really make sense. That corn-based ethanol is a classic example.

You know, at one point in time, it was the cat’s meow. It was gonna solve every problem known to man. And then, somebody realized, “Oh, we feed that corn to cows and chickens.” And so, you get disjointed circumstances there, because the government thought it was a cool idea. The private sector didn’t exploit it the same way. So, there’s a better way to get at it. It’s kind of a long-winded answer, which is what we do, is on that winner/loser thing that you’re talking about. There’s a whole better way to do it, but it doesn’t do that.

It puts all that stuff on the exact same playing field and then if you wanna do direct dollar grants out of this money that you’ve raised, then have that conversation. But that way, the money’s collected under a scheme that’s even-handed across all business.

Did you say we have more CPAs in office than attorneys?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, though, just a word of caution: I think I’m the CPA in Congress with a current license. And the reason I keep my license current is that I’m one election from being back in public practice, so I never know how CPAs are. We always got a fall-back position to go on [unintelligible]. But yes, I ran the first time on the idea that business viewpoint, business acumen was underrepresented in Congress. And I had found that was really truer than I even imagined.

Every day, I’m amazed, and this is both sides of the aisle, at how some of my colleagues, how little the understand about how hard it is to make money. It is very difficult to start a business, be successful, take those risks, gather the capital need that happen, and then try to make that work. And I think if more of us here had some of those kinds of experiences, we might be a little more judicious on regulations that we put in place, on taxes that we do and those kinds of things, as it relates to business.

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