Joe Scarborough: “When you talk about honest accounting, and talking about trust, I have to tell the gentleman, his job is going to be…”

“When you talk about honest accounting, and talking about trust, I have to tell the gentleman, his job is going to be made more difficult, the job of the gentleman from Wisconsin is going to be made more difficult, and this institution's job is going to be made more difficult in this area and the entitlement area in general, because of the shameless display we saw over the past 2 years of those who would attack us because we were trying to keep Medicare solvent. The gentleman talked about the trustees. They told us that Medicare was going bankrupt. So we had a group of people step forward with a bold proposal, and the Speaker of the House, who has been fodder for every political campaign over the past 2 years, the Speaker actually had the courage to step forward and say, I know Medicare is the third rail of American politics, I know we are not supposed to touch entitlements; but it is dying and we had better fix it now. If we do not fix it now, we are going to have to pay for it later, and it is going to be seniors and middle-class taxpayers who take the biggest hit if we do not fix it now. So we stepped forward and we had the courage to do something 2 years ago. Unfortunately, we paid for it in political terms, because there were others that used that against us.”