Political Quotes

“Mr. President, as you know, there is a great deal of discussion going on right now in different forums on whether to increase our debt limit and, as a part of that, how we can reduce this government's spending practices so that we won't have to keep extending the debt ceiling in the future. Those conversations include a lot of focus on reducing spending in the near term and finding ways to reform some of the entitlement programs so that spending will also be reduced over the long term because I think everyone agrees that the current way we spend money--40 cents of every dollar has to be borrowed--is literally going to result in bankruptcy if we don't bring it under control. There are those who say: Well, actually, the answer to the problem is to increase revenues--meaning raise taxes. The problem with that is we didn't get into this problem because we didn't tax enough; we got into this problem because we have been spending too much. The simplest way to think about it is that historically we spend about 20 percent of the gross domestic product. Under the Obama budgets, we are going to be spending--and we almost spend this much now--25 percent of the gross domestic product, and that is a spending increase that is not sustainable. Even under the largest of deficits, when President Bush was President, it was less than $\1/2\ trillion. But under the Obama budget, it is $1.5 trillion almost exactly for every year for the last 3 years and on into the future.…”