Q & A with Peter Welch

Andrew McKeever ?Çö Managing Editor
Friday, May 30, 2008

MANCHESTER ?Çö Peter Welch, Vermont's sole representative in Congress, is finishing up his first two-year term and preparing for a re-election bid. Recently he discussed some of the issues he has been grappling with in Washington, D.C. The following are excerpts from his interview with The Journal.

JOURNAL: What were some of the concerns that you and state representative Rick Hube encountered down here in southwestern Vermont about two weeks ago that were in the voters minds?

WELCH: Actually it was a really nice meeting. Rick Hube and I met with, I'd say there were 35, 40 people over the course of the hour and a half we were there. I tell you the big thing on people's minds are gas prices. The home heating fuel has been brutal in Vermont, it's over four bucks a gallon now. And the only relief people had about that is that the weather's getting warmer, but the gas prices is what I'm hearing about. And family budgets, you know, folks where you got two people working, and they're taking their cars to get the kids to day care. They're going to and from work, they're spending $80-100 a week on gas and there's not a lot of room in the family budget. It's interesting
last year around this time, a year ago, the main thing I was hearing about was the war, and of course the war continues, and there has been an immense amount of concern about it, but what I'm hearing about from folks at Congress and your community and heard with Rick in Londonderry was a lot of talk about affordability issues and centering on the high price of gas.

JOURNAL: What do you think Congress can or should do about it? One of the ideas proposed was a gas tax holiday. Is that an idea you support?

WELCH: Well no, I don't support dropping the gas tax, but there are things that we can do that I've been supporting very aggressively.

And the reason I don't (support a gas tax holiday) is that we pay 18 cents a gallon on the federal gas tax and there's a highway trust fund and Vermont gets that money back and them some to help us with our roads and our bridges and the maintaining of our highways. And I've got to tell you, one of the things that I've been hearing a lot about from Vermonters is the poor conditions of our roads, they do not want them to fall apart. So that's number one, we've got to maintain the infrastructure. The second is, I don't trust the oil companies at all and if we take 18 cents off the price of gas then they just use that as another reason to rip us off. We're going to deplete the highway trust fund, have bigger pot holes, and the oil company profits are just going to get fatter. So I don't support it. ...We have to keep our eye on the big picture, we have to have a long term energy strategy that gets us off the stranglehold of oil. The big oil companies are not our friends, and the oil producing states, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, they're not our friends, and why we maintain dependence on an energy policy that requires the good will of people that don't want to do us any favors makes no sense to me.

JOURNAL: Is it time to give more tax credits and support to wind and solar industries?

WELCH: I completely agree with that. Tax credits have traditionally been used, when they're used properly, to give a boost to an emerging industry where there's promise, there's social good, where we make a decision that we have to invest in order to create jobs and strengthen our economy. And obviously alternative energy, energy efficiency, these things are the emerging technology of our time and we are watching other countries move way ahead of us. On solar and on wind and we can't fall behind. Also it makes no sense, obviously to take tax payers dollars and give them away to oil companies which is a mature industry and an extraordinarily profitable industry. JOURNAL: One of the areas that you have been active in recently is credit card interest rates. What is the status of that legislation at the moment?

WELCH: Well again, consumers and merchants are being ripped off by the credit card industry. The credit card industry is essentially Visa and Master Card, and they own about 85 percent of the business and they have an immense amount of market control, and what they've done is they've used that market control to do two things. One is the good service. They provide secure transactions that benefit the consumer, provides convenience, an easy way to pay, and helps merchants. But the second thing they've done is bad, and that is, they've used their market control to rip off consumers and merchants. And the way they do that is by charging, my view, unconscionably high interest rates, in certain cases up to 30 percent. Number two, they're making a lot of money by coming up with creative ways to impose fees. There's got to be some protection.

JOURNAL: Do you think the Democrats will be able to unite behind whichever candidate ?Çö Clinton or Obama ?Çö gets the party's nomination?

WELCH: It's gotten rough and if you're in the campaigns this gets pretty raw and it will be hard feelings for a while, but for the average person, including me, where the differences are personal and they're not political ... they really share a lot of common goals so that's going to create the possibility for the vast majority of Democrats and like minded independents to get behind whoever emerges. I'm supporting Obama. The reason I like Obama, is he does two things. One is that you're seeing an enormous increase in activism in politics especially among young people, but not just young people. And I tell you, we're not going to get the change we need unless more Americans get involved in demanding it. Second, Obama view has the ability to talk across party lines and if I've learned anything down here in Washington is that we've got to work together more than we have in the past.