Christopher Shays: “I would start by saying a lot of good people are leaving Congress, a lot of people I have tremendous respect for. One of…”

“I would start by saying a lot of good people are leaving Congress, a lot of people I have tremendous respect for. One of their comments is they are leaving because it is not a fun place anymore; that there is some animosity between parties and among chambers. I was thinking, you know, the reason goes far more than that, because there is some disagreement that is quite significant. But I contend that some of my colleagues who are leaving are leaving when we need them the most and when the heavy lifting has really begun. In a way, they are escaping the responsibility for dealing with the crisis that has just been pushed for that next Congress to deal with. For decades we knew that we were getting ourselves deeper in a hole. At the end of the Vietnam war, if I went to 1974, the national debt was about $430 billion. That is the debt, not the deficits. That national debt has grown to $4.9 trillion, a tenfold increase since the last great war.”