The 30-Something Working Group
Floor Speech
THE 30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - May 23, 2007)
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you for letting me come down here for just a couple of seconds and add my voice to the chorus here.
You are absolutely right. When you are talking about something as essential as gas for people driving to and from work bringing their kids back and forth to school, it's not an optional expenditure. Now, in Connecticut we love to say there is another choice, people could get on some train or get on some bus, but they don't exist. They don't exist because unfortunately in some parts of this country we have neglected our mass transit infrastructure, and we have forced people to rely on their vehicles to get themselves around.
I just saw a statistic today that said in Waterbury, Connecticut, in the heart of my district, that one in six people in public housing are spending 66 percent of their income on rent, 66 percent of their income on rent. There is not much left for food. There is not much left for medicine. We know they have to pay more for medicine because less of them have health care. There is certainly not a lot left for transportation costs. This is hitting at the heart of the American middle class, at the heart of the American working class.
In just a second we will show a chart that would suggest that the reason for these increased prices at the pump is certainly not that the oil companies are crying poverty, certainly not because the bottom lines of American oil companies and national oil companies are hurting. It is hard to understand with the record profits, year after year. The last 3 or 4 years, every year, comes new record profits for these oil companies. How on Earth can we continue to see these prices go up?
I just want to say one more thing that was touched on. We have to talk about what national independence means, dependence on oil means for national security as well, over 170,000 barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia in 2006 and other OPEC countries. If you want to talk about why we can't bring a country like Saudi Arabia to the table, have a conversation about why they are creating a society in which their most marginalized members feel that their only resort is to extremism and violence; if you want to find out why we can't hold some of these Middle Eastern countries accountable for the societies that they are creating and the terrorism they are helping fuel, it's because we rely on their oil. It's because in the end we can't make them angry, because if we do, they are going to cut off the food that our cars eat.
Now, energy independence is about lowering gas prices. Antitrust legislation, price-gouging legislation, is about getting to the heart of the problem for middle-class consumers and drivers, the prices at the pump. But ultimately we have to figure out how to walk away from some of these quagmires we are in with countries that provide oil to us. We have got to understand that energy independence is about doing the right thing for middle-class families, to minivan moms.
It is also about doing the right thing for national security. It's also making sure that my future kids and grandkids are going to grow up in a society that's safe. That's why it's a triple whammy. Energy independence is about lowering energy prices, it's about cleaning up our environment, and it's also about national security. That's why I had to drag Mr. Ryan up to the rostrum to allow me get down here and say my 2 cents on this.
This is what the Democratic majority is going to deliver. It's going to go from a time when we could complain about gas prices and not see much action at all from Congress to a time now where we are still going to complain about it, but we are actually going to have a group of people here in the House and Senate and step up to the plate and do something about it.
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