with each one of you to try to craft a long-term piece of legislation to guide our nation s farmers and ranchers and give them the certitude they need. my home state is the home of over 48,000 farms, and we have over $1 billion in farm exports a year. so this is a pretty big deal to us. i m honored they gave me an opportunity to be here and work on it. we strongly prefer to keep the usda food safety and inspection service catfish inspection program. in addition, the setting of target prices, which are vital to many alabama farmers. i also support giving the livestock industry relief from the troublesome mandatory country of origin labeling mandates. the negotiations we face will be tough, and i am certain that not any conferee is going to go home with everything they want. but it s important that we be responsible stewards of the taxpayers dollars by maintaining the programs that are working and reforming those that don t. i believe we can work through these differences in a
can model and maybe i can go to an example. it works and it works really well. it is a profit maker. it is a government arm, but a phenomenal example of how all things government are not bad, right? we need to figure out how we do that for infrastructure. we need to have a summit approach to that topic alone, because i think ports and rail and airports and all that, this is becoming a bottleneck. the positive side is the reason our energy market has become what it has become is because we have infrastructure. this country s pipeline and storage networks and energy, which is why it is so important that we do not disable that that is why we have a domestic energy sector that is so competitive, to make a point. there is proof positive to why your question is something we ought to tackle. we move products all around the world, and our supply chain is world class. it rides on infrastructure, and and we see infrastructure across the world, and we have opportunities to improve t
current consensus, but retail will be the theme of the day, whether the consumer is back in a big way, whether it is a game changer and what that means for the market and the economy and everything else. i know we ll be talking about it it at noon. we re going to get our last word. they can talk about it for just one second and not that long because we ve only got a minute and we ll talk to henry blodget and curtis artledge. you asked a question about jc penn penney. maybe they can raise more cash, but they re running out of cash at this point. they don t have that much left. you have a final thought on either jc penney or more importantly, the markets? i think today s entire discussion has been about the early stages of confidence building and we get past these two gigantic minefields of fiscal cliff and sequester. we start to see m & a pickup and retail sales and they re willing to spend money because they re more scared about their job. we see capital expenditures an