Boeing Loses

Floor Speech

BOEING LOSES -- (Senate - March 04, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, will the Senator from Kansas yield for a question?

Mr. BROWNBACK. I am happy to yield.

Mrs. MURRAY. I am listening to the Senator from Kansas, and he makes a very good point about the infrastructure that will be needed to be built to build these larger airplanes. Was any of the cost of building those runways or those hangars to accommodate the larger airplanes in part of the bid from Airbus?

Mr. BROWNBACK. I understand from the Air Force yesterday that some of it was, but I don't understand if it was--I do not know fully if it was just the U.S. cost or if it is also what we are going to have to get from other countries around the world on costs there for landing, longer landing strips, and bigger hangars to be able to put any of the aircraft in. So I don't know if that is fully in it as well. But these are huge, decade-long projects and costs.

Mrs. MURRAY. I thank the Senator. I think it is a point we have to look at in terms of the costs of providing this military contract to a subsidized foreign company as well as the future costs--not just for those airplanes but for the infrastructure to handle it and our capability of doing that.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, we have just started this discussion, and I think it is a big one, I think it is an important one, whether we should be dependent upon European governments for our global reach in military for our aircraft. That is what tankers provide us is a global reach and whether we should be dependent on the European governments--upon the French, upon the Germans, upon the Brits--for our global reach. I don't think we should be. I think we have to look at the subsidization of this cost by the Europeans. I think that needs to be discounted and taken out of this proposal. I think we have to look at a long-term project, and we are going to be talking about this a lot before we go forward with this--as Chancellor Merkel called it, this giant success for Airbus and the European aviation industry. It may have been that it is at our cost. I am not going to stand still and let it happen.

I yield the floor.

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