let me thank senator boozman for staying. i'd respond on that that you know, there clearly are costs if you apply what i've proposed which is a carbon fee, but if you make it revenue neutral, then every single dollar of it goes back to the american public. so netanyahu there's no cost. what you get is savings in terms of not having to fortify our coasts, for instance, against rising sea levels. not having to figure out how you deal with firnermen whose catches have moved either offshore or out into deeper waters or into other states that they can't reach any longer, what you do with foresters whose forests have burned because the pine beetle climbed up higher because there was no code snap to wipe them out. so there's the red forests that senator merkley described. and then there's the competitiveness question which is if we invest only in the fossil fuels which are on the wrong end of the cost curve that dr. lashof described solar and these technology based sources are going to continue to reduce and fossil an extractive bas

boozman: thank you, madam president. i'm here today as a voice for our veterans and career military service members. since i came to congress in 2001, i've served on the veterans' affairs committee both in the house and the senate. and have continuously fought to uphold the promises we have made with the men and women who served on behalf of our nation. i am continually looking for opportunities to improve their lives of our veterans. who have served honorably and have sacrificed, sometimes with their lives in support of our country. they deserve every benefit that they've earned. and what we have promised them. but they have suffered a grave injustice in this body. late last year the senate without my support agreed to a badge budget that cut retirement benefits of our veterans reducing the cost of living adjustment. i certainly could not support this provision. veterans and the american people are rightly upset. i want to share some of the letters that i've received from our veterans and other arkansas david mullens fr

boozman: thank you, madam president. surprisingly, the president didn't talk much about obamacare, his -- quote -- signature achievement. the people of arkansas, the people of america certainly are talking a great deal about it and are writing a great deal about it also. the reason being is that they are so concerned that health care has become an absolute mess. the president talked about a single mom that was able to resolve the problem of her preexisting conditions, and i think that we all agree that that's something that was desperately needed. i'm an opt w terrorist, an -- an optomotrist and aware of the problems this can create. we can fix this without creating a situation where we have thousands of pages of regulation and the reality is the unintended consequences of the situation we're in now with obamacare is we've made it unaffordable. we've made it such that millions of americans simply can't afford the health insurance they're being offered. let me talk about a few, where people have written me and talked to m

senator boozman. >> thank you, madam chair. again, thank you for holding the hearing. i'm glad that we're reviewing the president's climate change -- president's climate regulation plan. oversight is a good thing and we appreciate you all being here. in fact, we need to have you up here more often discussing not only these issues, but these really important problems that we face as a nation. today the question is not whether greenhouse gases trap ped, they do. the question is whether current climate science can predict and adequately explain the complexity of climate change. can it do so well, do it to the point that our politicians here in washington can manipulate the earth's temperature from their desk as we speak. certainly their track record in that regard in the past has not been very good in a number of different things. the question is whether expensive regulations would have significant impact on the global climate and whether the president's policies are worth it. sadly, this plan appears to be all pain and no gain. the president once said his climate policie

that was introduced as i recall by senators begich and boozman in a bipartisan way. and here's the story here which is very important. as we saw last year in the event of a prolonged government shutdown, the veterans administration would not have been able to issue disability compensation or pension payments or provide educational benefits to millions of deserving veterans. the truth of the matter was that during that shutdown, we were perhaps a week or ten days away from disabled veterans and others not getting the benefits that for many of them is exactly what they depend upon. it's what they depend upon to buy groceries. it's what they depend upon to pay their mortgage, to pay their car payments. we were a week or 10 days away from those veterans not getting those benefits. i'm happy to say that in this legislation, we have addressed that issue and we have moved forward with advanced appropriations for mandatory accounts at the v.a. mr. president, our economy is making slow progress. we are creating jobs but nobody believes that we are anywhere near where we want