Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, for the gentleman from Pennsylvania, a bit of reference, in the old days when we were put in the chair, particularly when we were freshman, it is because we had been annoying to the Speaker. I don't know if anyone remembers that. I love the clerk staff, I appreciate them, and I am sorry to say we are about to do a whole bunch of math and a lot of numbers really fast, but it is where we are at. Mr. Speaker, one of the things I am going to try to do today is basically sell two ideas. One is--and I want to be honest and careful in this because my goal is not to be sarcastic, not to be a jerk, but walk through the scale--just the scale--of the borrowing, the debt problem of our demographics, what is really going on. {time} 1400 Mr. Speaker, I am going to walk through just a couple of examples of solutions we get from our wonderful, brilliant constituents and sort of explain there are probably things we should do, but they are tiny rounding errors. People don't understand. Annually, I think we expect to borrow about $7 billion a day. I think, so far this fiscal year, we are borrowing about $10 billion a day. The second thing is incredibly important. If there is a staffer out there or a freshman Member of Congress, burn what we are going to talk about into their consciousness. In the United States, what is the greatest at least economic threat I think we have for this government, in many ways, for the country? Interest. We are what is called interest fragile.…”