Political Quotes

“I just wish to bring to my colleagues' attention a very well-written but disturbing op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal by one of our country's foremost economists, a person whose calculations and prognostications we should not lightly lay aside, Larry Lindsey. In this piece, entitled ``The Deficit Is Worse Than We Think,'' he posits three reasons why we need to get serious about deficit reduction. I will just mention the three reasons, put this op-ed in the Record, and make a comment or two about it. First, he says, if interest rates in this country go back to their historic levels, we would have annual interest expenses on our debt roughly $420 billion higher in 2014 and $700 billion higher in 2020, and the 10-year rise in interest rates would be about $4.9 trillion higher than under the current cost of borrowing. That would obviously wipe out any savings, and then some, that we are trying to achieve in our deficit reduction discussions. The second problem is, the official forecasts for growth are probably far too rosy considering the current circumstances. If we were to grow at a rate that he believes is much more realistic than those projected by the President's budget, we will miss the President's budget number by a cumulative 5.2 percentage points and incur an additional debt of $4 trillion, which is the equivalent to all the 10-year savings in the budget that passed the House of Representatives.…”