On the recordJune 25, 2014
My colleague from Arizona who actually has an amazing district and was actually an amazing leader when we lost 19 of our firefighters this time last year, I appreciate him putting that into the Record for all of those in Arizona. I wanted to do something a little different tonight. A few months ago, we came to the floor here and sort of walked through what was really going on in the math. One of the things that sort of enrages me is so much of the debate we have here in Congress is the noise. We talk about this issue or that issue when we have the 10,000 pound gorilla in front of us, and that is what is happening to us fiscally. Right now, and I am going to be using a lot of numbers tonight, and we are going to try to put up as many of these on our Facebook page and on our Web site so folks can actually see these charts. First off, if this were 1 year ago, we were having discussions of what was the fiscal year 2014 deficit going to be, and we had some folks making these optimistic projections that we were only going to be in the $400-some billion shortfall that year. {time} 1815 It is still a stunning amount of money. It has only gotten worse though. Remember, we were supposed to be on the way out. Employment was getting better; income was getting better. Taxes are up dramatically in this country. Remember, we have just hit the alltime high revenues ever for the United States. So what could possibly be wrong?…
