Bill Foster

I personally, from a political point of view, am very skeptical that unless we have an automatic punchbowl retractor, it is going to be very difficult to hold back.

Household net worth has rebounded by more than 10 times that.

It is remarkable, in that context, that we are not in a great depression today.

It is hard to actually look at this and conclude that there was not a positive benefit.

When people ask me to reduce to a single number where are we and where our economy is, I go to household net worth.

There's no transparency here. I mean, Obama promised that we're going to have time to look at everything that goes through Congress.

The title of this hearing involves monetary policy, but the subject seems to be the overall health of the economy.

The systemic risk probably is not there if that is what we are worried about.

The most interesting number to me there is that credit default swaps are 7 percent, which is interesting considering the effect that they have had on our economy.

There is not a lot of action that is necessary from our point of view there.

I think we should all show some humility in our current situation and look laterally at countries that have systems that did not get into this mess.

I find this business of having assigning these ratings, which are essentially names for numbers, just absolutely bizarre.

I would like to thank Chairman Frank for holding this important hearing.

For far too long, the residents of my district have suffered under a failed State government which for seven years has been unable to pass a capital bill.

This legislation could not come at a more necessary time for the people of Illinois who are struggling mightily with deteriorating roads and little support from their government to maintain them.

I therefore offer my suggestion to the committee that we create and formalize a new system of scoring and tracking the long-term success and budgetary impact of our investments.

As a scientist and a new Member of Congress, one of my frustrations is the tendency of politicians to consider all issues in terms of how they play out in the next election rather than evaluating what is in the long-term best interest of…

I do not support the suggestion that the cutoff of the farm safety net should be placed at $500,000 of total sales.

I strongly support the budget's proposed increases in basic science funding.

The decisions that we make in drawing up this budget will have tremendous impact on the lives of all Americans for years to come.

It is a vast improvement over the budgets in recent years, and I hope to support it in its final form.

I would like to voice my strong support for the innovative and new proposal to boost employees' retirement savings by requiring employers to automatically enroll employees in 401(k) and IRA accounts.

Given how badly the Bush administration mangled this first infusion of TARP money, Members are extremely wary of granting additional funds. But thanks to the diligent work of the chairman and former and current members of the Financial…