Political Quotes

“in June, Congress passed a bipartisan bill to increase the debt limit and impose meaningful fiscal controls. That law was appropriately titled the ``Fiscal Responsibility Act.'' Its passage marked a long-overdue step toward fiscal sanity. I assume you have to go back about a dozen years until Congress had taken such a fiscally responsible step. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, as we call it here in town, projects the Fiscal Responsibility Act could save Americans $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. I say ``could save'' because for this to hold true, Congress must adhere to the spending caps that it has imposed. The CBO's latest long-term budget outlook shows that in 30 years, our national debt will be $11 trillion lower than previously projected. This is, in large part, thanks to this bill passed this year, the Fiscal Responsibility Act. While $11 trillion is certainly a large sum, it is a drop in the bucket compared to the $118 trillion in debt that the United States is expected to chalk up over those same 30 years. So, of course, the fiscal path we are on is not sustainable. If you take debt held by the public, today public debt is about as large as the annual U.S. economic outlook. Within 6 years, public debt will reach a historically high 107 percent of GDP. The previous record was set in the wake of World War II.…”