Political Quotes

“Madam President, I also am one of those who worried over this vote over the weekend that we passed yesterday. I spoke on this very floor about the fact that I did not like the estate tax. I did not think wealthy Americans needed a sustained tax cut. Then I began to make some calls to economists. What I found was a kind of double-edged sword. One, they did believe the package had a stimulative nature of anywhere between .6 and 1.1 percent, .6 being about 600,000 jobs--so 600,000 to 1.2 million jobs; unemployment insurance was stimulative; the payroll tax cut was stimulative, et cetera; and that we needed to do this. But then the flip side. And the flip side was, we are now reaching 63 percent of GDP in debt. What will happen is one day, if this continues, we will go off a cliff economically. Some time ago, during the end of the Bush administration, many of us were on a phone call. We heard Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke say that we are on the brink of a major collapse of this economy. Everything could go down--banks, credit institutions, et cetera. I never thought this could ever happen in America. I now know that the unprecedented can, in effect, happen in America, and that when we vote for a package that puts almost $1 trillion additional on debt and deficit, we had better have a way to make a pivot, as some people have called it, and do those things that can curb expenditures. We are fortunate.…”