On the recordJuly 19, 2011
I thank the gentleman for yielding. After a 3-year spending spree in which the President drove up the national debt 56 percent, he has the nerve to tell the American people to eat their peas. After he has been on this supersize-me diet, he turns around and tells struggling middle class families how to behave. One must ask, where has the President been? He owns this economy. He has been in office nearly 3 years; it is his. It's his policies that have left 15 million Americans out of work; it's his policies that have stifled growth and business investment; it's his policies that have created and are continuing these so-called ``tax breaks'' for Big Oil. It's his very signature that has extended the Bush tax cuts. It's his policies that have given us the highest deficit spending in the history of the United States of America. He owns this, not President Bush, not Vice President Cheney, not the Republican Party, not Halliburton, not all the other straw men that the President likes to set up to distract the American people. It was President Obama who cut Medicare $562 billion. It was President Obama who set up IPAB, which is a health care rationing system which our moms and dads and grandparents will have to be suffering under. It was this President who took unemployment from 7 percent up to nearly 10 percent. And now we're having the debate of the decade, and where is the President?…
