Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady for yielding. Listening to this debate in my office, I just had to come down here because it sounds like this debate is taking place in a vacuum here, like we didn't do anything else this past week. It's been noted that we're providing extra money for FEMA, some for projects that are in the pipeline already, some for disasters that we know will occur. You could put that aside and realize that we're spending I think it's $600 million--$600 million, new money, every dime of which will be borrowed. Because we're running a deficit, every dime will be borrowed. Now you may say, ``All this is being taken from the stimulus.'' We borrowed the stimulus. We borrowed the stimulus money. We are borrowing nearly 40 percent of the money that we're spending here at the Federal level. So they'll say, ``Oh, yes. This is being taken from another program that's already funded.'' But you have to realize we're borrowing that money, too. So $600 million to create temporary jobs for kids in the summertime, apparently, with no notion that we may have put a lot of people out of work with what we just did earlier this week. You know, we pass a lot of laws here. We're good at that. But we aren't very good at suspending the laws of economics. We can't do that. We can pretend that we can, but we can't do it. We can't suspend the laws of economics, and we can't phase them in, either.”