Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to explain something. I have come behind this mike a number of times, and I have had a little trouble. Apparently, I am not communicating well, so I am going to try a slightly different way. Let's back up a bit. I think I was behind this mike 2 weeks ago and then the week before that and probably the week before that. One of my comments was that I can't figure out how the United States can have a 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, at one point, GDP growth and still be borrowing at the rate we are borrowing. Remember, a week or so ago, we had 3 days during that week when we went over a $100,000 a second borrowing. We see tax receipts up 7-plus percent, yet we are still burning through cash at an incredible rate and having to borrow. It turns out, last Friday, we got the punch line. We were wrong. The Atlanta Fed and others had their math wrong. We got an update. We were all thinking that the GDP the Atlanta Fed had been estimating the first quarter of this calendar year--not fiscal year, calendar year--was sitting at about 2.7 percent. They came in and said no, they were wrong. It looks like we are at about 1.6 percent. That is a big deal, and it helps explain why we were having such difficulty getting the math to line up. Why is this a big deal? The other concept I have been trying to sell and trying to sink into our skulls here is the bankers, the people who buy U.S.…”