Political Quotes

“I am here on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and I want to just state our opposition to the balanced budget amendment. It is worth reviewing the history on this topic. When President Bill Clinton left office, he left this country with surpluses. He had reversed the policy of Reagan economics, which had some of the largest structural deficits in the 1980s and during the first President Bush's term. And then we went from record surpluses back to deficits. And what was the reason for those deficits? There were two very simple reasons. One, we made a strategic mistake in Iraq and spent trillions of dollars, which even President Trump has acknowledged was a blunder, and that ballooned the deficit. And secondly, we made a decision to provide tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans. Now, the Democrats supported the tax cut for the middle class, for folks making $50- to $75,000, but we said you don't need to provide tax cuts for people making $1 million, $500,000; you don't need to provide tax cuts for those who are already paying capital gains tax rates at 20 percent and don't need additional tax breaks. So those two decisions, the intervention overseas and our continued interventions overseas and these extraordinary tax breaks for the very wealthy, have led us to the deficits that we have today, have led us to the $20 trillion debt. No one wants that kind of debt.…”