Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the floor today referring to a speech that Senator Biden gave on this Senate floor 39 years ago today. The scene was this: It developed over several months of that year before May 2, 1984. I had this idea which would be considered crazy today, that we need to get control of the budget by just freezing everything across the board. And I recruited Nancy Kassebaum, a Senator from Kansas, and Senator Biden to help in that effort. Senator Biden gave the longest speech that day on justifying it, and most of his comments at that time were trying to justify that you could actually freeze the defense budget, and also it included the freeze on the COLAs for Social Security. But Senator Biden spent most of his speech fighting off giants of the military industrial complex at that time, by the names of Senator Goldwater, Senator Towers, and Senator Stevens of Alaska. So that is the background of what I am talking about today. So on this day, 39 years ago, then-Senator Biden spoke on the Senate floor saying that he was ``outraged''--that is his words--that our national debt would soon be near $2 trillion. He urged fellow Senators to ``do something . . . before the debt limit increase comes up.'' The ``something'' that he advocated for was a Federal spending freeze. Today, our national debt stands at $31.5 trillion compared to that $2 trillion in 1984.…”