Toomey visits Honesdale - Wayne Independent
Wayne Independent
By Kevin Zwick
July 23, 2010
Honesdale, Pa. —Private sector job growth and fiscal responsibility are top priorities for Republican candidate Pat Toomey as he and Democratic candidate Joe Sestak vie for Sen. Arlen Specter’s soon to be open U.S. Senate seat.
Toomey recently stopped at The Wayne Independent during a campaign trip in Wayne County to discuss some current events in Washington D.C., including his disdain for the new financial reform bill and the moratorium on Marcellus Shale drilling.
“It’s not a good bill,” Toomey said about the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (H.R. 4173).
Toomey said the act will increase the likelihood of taxpayer bailouts of big banks, raise costs for consumers and reduce availability of credit for businesses and consumers.
“It does absolutely nothing about the biggest drivers of the economic disaster— Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” he said.
According to the text of the bill, H.R. 4173 is meant “to end ‘too big to fail,’ to protect American taxpayers by ending bailouts, to protect consumers from abusive financial services practice,” according to the document text.
The bill also creates the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which Toomey said, “may or may not be innocuous.”
“That depends on how they actually develop their rules,” he said.
On the hot-button issues of the Marcellus Shale moratorium, Toomey said he thinks that the Delaware River Basin Commission’s moratorium was a big mistake.
“[The drilling] is a huge economic opportunity for new jobs for Pennsylvania and rural Pennsylvania in general,” Toomey said. “It has to be done safely and be properly regulated. The DEP already regulates it”
Toomey said that the Department of Environmental Protection needs more resources and inspectors to be able to handle the proposed drilling because it will be on a much larger scale.
“My opponent Joe Sestak is in favor of a complete statewide moratorium, and I think that is a big mistake,” he said.
“We have way too little economic growth, far too few jobs. Sestak has never worked in the private sector, never created new jobs,” Toomey said.
