Political Quotes

“I am going to try to focus more on discretionary, just so people understand. The vast majority of our spending is on autopilot, but a lot of us have no understanding of how much the wheels have come off just this year, and this is so important to start the process. I am going to start with a board, and please understand, if this were May 2022--you remember how long ago that was? Like a year. We expected the U.S. deficit for this year to be $980 billion. Okay. So where are we at today? One year later, we are functionally pushing $1.18 trillion. We functionally have doubled the borrowing this year. What happened? Healthcare costs went up dramatically. Interest is up dramatically. Tax receipts are down. What happens if some of the protections we have for the next couple of years are off? Remember, that $1.8 trillion that we are projected to borrow in this fiscal year, we weren't supposed to hit that for almost 8 more years. The wheels are coming off, and if you are on the left and you care about this program or that program, understand, there is no money. You should help us go at every dollar here. So we get into this game of saying, oh, but that is discretionary, discretionary is fairly flat. It really is just not true. It is a lot flatter than Medicare, Social Security, all of those. But those are earned benefits that are about our aging population. We need to walk through a sense of reality, and you are going to get the punch line here in a moment.…”