Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership on this issue. Say what you want to about freshmen in this institution. I was elected with the vice chairman of the Budget Committee back in 2010, the largest freshman class in history, and it changed this place; changed this place. Largest freshmen class of Republicans and Democrats in history. You need new faces and new ideas. And what you all have done in terms of a Budget Committee at work has just been amazing. What I have here to contribute is a chart of CBO's projections of GDP growth. And we have some of our Democratic colleagues here on the floor. I just want to say, and I hope folks hold me accountable to it, we can't cut our way into prosperity. We just can't do it. Cutting our way into prosperity isn't going to happen. You cut budgets because there is bad spending in budgets. You don't cut budgets because cutting is an end in and of itself. You cut things that are bad. You plus up things that are good. So much of the challenge that we have balancing this budget--we have done amazing things in terms of reducing wasteful spending in the 5 years that I have been in this body. But the economy keeps declining, the regulation nation that is the new United States of America, draining productivity. When I arrived, the CBO projected we would be growing at about 3 percent a year as a nation.…”