Political Quotes

“we have already heard that this really is not about education. We are all committed to education. There are philosophical differences as to whether or not the education can best be paid for at the Federal level or at the State and local level. I think most of us on our side of the aisle believe this is a local responsibility. We can have programs that are better, more efficient, better funded, better for children if they are run locally and funded locally. But that is not really the issue that is involved here because we have increased spending. If we put all the spending of State, Federal and local spending together, we have increased dramatically. Over the last 40 years, even when we take inflation into account, we have more than doubled the per capita spending. Can anybody in this body look at the statistics and say we are getting more for the dollars that we are spending on education? I doubt it. So the issue really is whether or not we are going to spend more to provide for Federal bureaucracies. That is really what we are talking about, keeping the bureaucracies in place who run these Federal programs that amount to only 5 percent of the total education dollars. Now, I know this is a little bit inside baseball, but the gimmick that is being used here is very clever, and I think my colleagues need to know about it.”