Not Learning From History

Floor Speech

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Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for pulling us together this evening for this discussion.

In Wyoming, our economy is very much based in the energy industry because we have coal, oil, gas, uranium, wind, solar, biomass, and that is the mainstay of our economy by far.

So as we watch the 350 to 375 very small businesses that are drilling for oil and gas and see the legislation that is coming before this Congress at the behest of the Democratic Party, it will devastate our businesses.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. Absolutely. I think the Americans have the perception that Big Oil is who is recovering these natural resources; but even those firms hire very small, literally mom-and-pop operations, five and six employees to go out and drill the drilling, to do some environmental compliance, to do the surveying, and to complete those wells, and do the fracturing of the deep seams that are required to cause the gas to flow into a natural gas well. These are very small operators. As I said, in Wyoming alone, over 350 businesses.

Yet what we see on the horizon taxwise through the national energy tax that's being called cap-and-trade would be utterly devastating to those businesses.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman.

In Wyoming, we have had surpluses in our budget for the last 7 years, and it is because of the explosive growth in the production of energy. It has made our unemployment among the lowest in the Nation. In fact, there were times during the last 7 years that we have had, statistically, zero unemployment. Incredible. While I was running for this position, I stopped at a fast-food place to get an iced tea late at night, and they offered me a job and my daughter a job at this fast-food place because they are so much in need of employees.

Wyoming is unique in that regard, and it is because we are producing domestic energy. And there are new discoveries of domestic natural gas all over the United States. The Balkan in North Dakota is fantastic. It is producing wealth for people who have been farming at that very narrow margin of profitability, 0 to 4 percent, for years.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. Not only are we producing the cleanest burning hydrocarbon that there is, natural gas, but we are doing it in a way that makes us less dependent on foreign energy. And what we are seeing in this Congress are policies that will actually make us more dependent on foreign energy at a time-

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Mrs. LUMMIS. And to the gentleman from Missouri, we are also proposing in this Congress to tax drilling costs, to raise the taxes on the brackets, to do away with the death tax, to put the recovery of natural gas under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Virtually every time I turn around, almost every day here, we are doing something that will impair our ability to produce our own natural resources.

And it's not just in Wyoming, there have been these fabulous new finds of natural gas that run up both sides of the Appalachian Mountains all the way from Pennsylvania clear to the Southern States. All of those States could have new natural gas production, the cleanest burning hydrocarbon, that reduces our need for foreign energy, that reduces the out-migration of jobs, it keeps them here, it grows them here. It grows revenue for those States.

I can tell you, as our State treasurer in Wyoming for 8 years, we had, just off interest income off State investments, the largest source of income for our State's general fund from one source, interest income off State investments. And all of those State investments, every one of them, came from severance taxes on oil, gas, coal, uranium.

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