Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in a short time we are going to vote on a tax measure that gives the Senate a very clear choice, and here is the choice: At the end of this year, a whole battery of tax cuts that were enacted into law years ago will expire, on December 31. The question is, What is going to happen next? If we do nothing, a very good thing will happen but also a very bad thing will happen. The good thing is that if the taxes go up on virtually all Americans for 10 years, we will reduce our deficit by $5 trillion--more than any group has been able to suggest or come up with a plan to achieve in any of the meetings in which we have been involved. That is $5 trillion in deficit reduction. It is an amazing reduction. There is another side to the ledger. On the other side of the ledger it says: If we start taxing families now while this economy is in recovery, it is going to slow down the recovery. Well, that is natural. People have less money to spend, and many working families living paycheck to paycheck will face a new hardship they don't have today. They reduced their spending, the economy contracts, and we see this recession hang on with high unemployment and businesses failing. So it really is a very Faustian choice, a difficult choice--reduce the deficit dramatically, on one hand, by letting all the tax cuts expire but risk going into a deeper recession and maybe repeating what happened a few years ago, which devastated our economy.…”