Political Quotes

“Madam President, a speaker on the floor earlier--Senator Johanns of Nebraska--was talking about TARP, and many of us recall this was a program started under the previous administration. President Bush and his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, came to us, along with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and basically told us America's economy and perhaps the global economy was on the edge of an abyss; that we could see what looked like an economic downturn turn into not only a recession but worse if we didn't act and act quickly. The proposal they made was to go after what they called toxic assets, and so they created a program called the Toxic Assets Relief Program-- TARP. They asked for some $80 billion--an enormous sum of money--in order to go to financial institutions that were teetering on the brink of collapse and save them, in the hopes that in doing so, they could stabilize our economy. Even though I took a few economics courses in college and have followed the course of American business, at least as a casual observer, it was hard to argue against their request because my fear was that failure to do anything would, in fact, bring this economy down, costing us dramatic numbers of jobs and failures in the business community. So I voted for TARP. It seemed like one of the few things we could do that might have some chance of stabilizing the economy. Of course, it is not the most popular program in America.…”