Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Wyoming. It is my pleasure to be on the Senate floor with him and to talk about my experience in dealing with the reality of a balanced budget amendment. As I said a couple of weeks ago when I spoke on the floor about this issue, I heard many come to the floor who said: This is a bad idea. This is bad policy. Some have even gone so far as to describe it as almost kind of a radical approach. I have lived with a balanced budget amendment. I have to say I did not find it to be a radical approach whatsoever. In the State of Nebraska where I was Governor for 6 years, and actually prior to that when I was mayor of the State capital, the community of Lincoln, I had to balance the budget. I had no choice whatsoever about that. In fact, in Nebraska, we had an additional provision. Decades and decades ago, when those who wrote the Nebraska Constitution started thinking about what kind of State they wanted, I think they wisely realized that at some point the politicians would try to hand off or give away the State treasury and promise everything to everybody for obvious reasons: to get elected, to get reelected. So in the State constitution they said we can't borrow over $100,000. So we had two requirements. One was that on an annual basis the budget had to be balanced, and the spending could not exceed the revenues.…”