Political Quotes

“Would my colleague yield? Madam President, I want to follow up--we are supposed to talk about tomorrow being Delaware Day, if I could do that. But I wish to follow up on Senator Coons' remarks on the fiscal cliff. A friend of mine who has done a lot of research on the fiscal cliff says that if you look at domestic and discretionary spending, that is not really the overwhelming problem as far as why we continue to have a big budget deficit. The problem is really twofold. One of those is that if you look at revenues as a percentage of GDP, historically when we have been in budget, the revenues as a percentage of GDP, at least in the last 10, 15 years, revenues have been about 21 percent of GDP. Today they are about 15, 16 percent of GDP. But the other big driver in our deficit situation going forward is health care costs. It is health care costs, including Medicare and Medicaid. While we have to be smart enough to try to figure it out while being humane about caring for older people and the poor who count on Medicaid and Medicare to some extent, we have to focus on how to get better health care results for less money. That is what we have to focus on--how to get better health care results for less money. There are a lot of good ideas for doing that. Some of them are actually part of the health care law for our country. So it is revenues, and the other key here is better health care results for less money.…”