Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, every week I come behind this microphone, and I walk through the demographics and the debt and try to demonstrate that the primary driver of debt is our demographics and our health. I have brought lots and lots of charts here over the last couple years sort of demonstrating the death spiral the country is heading towards. Total interest this year is going to be maybe just a little shy of $1.2 trillion, making interest the second biggest expenditure in this government. Social Security will be about $1.480 trillion; interest $1.2 trillion, and then, believe it or not, Defense and Medicare are fighting for who is going to be third and fourth. I thought it would actually be more honorable to come behind this mike and say, all right, we have defined the problem over and over and over and over. I don't seem to be making much progress with my brothers and sisters being willing to accept the actual math because our friends from the left say tax rich people more and that will take care of the problem. Then we show them the economic papers that make it clear that you can maximize people's taxes for those over $400,000 on their income tax, their estate tax, the whole list of taxes, and when you do economic effects, you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. For us on the right, we have all sorts of things we want to cut, but if we are limited to only nondefense discretionary, we come up with about 1 percent of GDP.…”