Press Releases

Sen. Wicker Discusses Health Care, the Tanker Bid, and GO Zone Legislation

Senator Wicker’s remarks on Gulf Coast Mornings with Kipp Greggory and Steve Dickerson

November 13, 2009

WASHINGTON – Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., today gave a Congressional update and discussed issues important to Mississippians with Kipp Greggory and Steve Dickerson during their Gulf Coast Mornings program on 104.9 FM.  Below are some of the key excerpts from the interview:

 

Health Care
On Democrats’ health care spending:

  • “[The Democrats] do some accounting tricks: the first ten years you have a decade worth of taxes, but only about six years worth of programs.”
  • “But when it’s finally implemented, the House bill under Pelosi is about $3 trillion in extra spending in a time when we’re already suffering from a deficit of $1.4 trillion in one short year and unemployment rates of 10.2 percent, something we haven’t seen in three decades in the United States.  This is not the time for a big entitlement program.”
  • “[You] can’t enact a $3 trillion program and say it’s going to save money…a new entitlement program has never done that.”

On Democrats’ proposed Medicare cuts:
  • “We really ought to be shoring up Medicare.  This is a program that is going to go broke. And yet, all of these bills take at least $400 billion out of Medicare [and] not to help shore up that system.  Instead, we’re taking it and trying to create yet a third huge health care entitlement program.”
  • “These Medicare cuts are real. They’ll hurt rural health care in small town America. Rural, small town health care will suffer if these Medicare cuts go through.”

NOTE:  To read Senator Wicker’s latest health care column click here; to watch his latest floor speech on health care click here. 

Air Force Tanker:

  • “I just want us to make tankers on the Coast.  I want us to have an aerospace corridor.  I think if we have an honest-to-goodness competition again, that our guys will win.  And these are American jobs - don’t let anybody say this is not an American airplane that Northrop Grumman and EADS [would build].”
  • “It says something to me that in every competition around the world, the [aircraft Northrop Grumman and EADS are proposing] has won, and it’s the only one actually flying and refueling anywhere in the world right now.”

Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone Legislation:
On his recent legislation to extend the GO Zone bonus depreciation by two years:

  • “This is something we can do that would actually be an economic stimulus.  Because Katrina isn’t over and the rebuilding has been slowed, a lot of it by government regulation.”
  • “We need an extra two years, and we’re going to fight for it.”

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