Political Quotes

“Let me complete one thought. Then I will be happy to yield. Secondly, the President has put in a payroll tax cut. What that means is, working families will get about 2 percent more each pay period. The belief of the President--and I share it--is that kind of helping hand ends up with dollars in the hands of many families spent into the economy. I hope we extend the payroll tax cut as part of this agreement. It doesn't serve specifically the need for deficit reduction, but it certainly serves the need for us to stimulate the economy and have people buy more. Right now we have a crisis of consumer confidence, and I think it is brought on by the bad news out of Washington--we have to share some of this blame--and it is brought on by the fact that many people overborrowed before the recession set in, many times going deeply into debt. For example, in the 1990s, the average indebtedness of a family was 84 percent of their annual income. By the year 2007, it had reached about 125 percent, a 15-percent increase in indebtedness. Now families facing that indebtedness are retrenching, holding back, not making commitments, and it is coming down to 112 percent and slowly back to where it should be. What we are trying to do is to give people some spending power to create more consumer and aggregate demand for goods and services for business growth in this country.…”