Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his kind words and his great leadership on all of the issues that are important to America's working families. Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor to talk about the balanced budget constitutional amendment, but before I get into my comments specifically to the amendment, I want to acknowledge that the gentleman from Texas, the distinguished chairman of the committee, Mr. Smith, has talked about what the deficit was in 1995 and how much bigger it is now and the distinguished maker of this resolution today, Mr. Goodlatte, talked about the problem of having such a big national debt. Recognizing those two facts, I want to speak up about them. First of all, if this were just talking about how we can reduce the deficit, the best way to do that is job creation. We know that. If we want to talk about what happened in the nineties, we have to reference the fact that under President Bill Clinton, the Reagan-Bush deficit that he inherited he turned around, and five of his last budgets, the Clinton budgets, were in balance or were in surplus. He put us on a trajectory, he and the growth of jobs in our country in the public, and largely in the private sector, took us to a path, a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. Along comes President George W. Bush and in record time, he reversed that. It was the biggest fiscal turnaround in our Nation's history, taking us to a trajectory of over $5 trillion in deficit, an $11 trillion turnaround.…”