Political Quotes

“this is a historic vote that we will be having. I rise in support of the Solomon balanced budget resolution, and I do for one particular reason at least, but there are others. It is because I do not see that the administration, nor do I see anywhere else that there is any plans whatsoever to balance the budget either in this century or the one that is coming up. And lo and behold, come fiscal year 1999, we are going to have new debt, counting trust fund borrowing, of over $350 billion as we go into the next century. I came to Congress in January of 1985. The debt was $1.4 trillion. I have witnessed all kinds of 5-year plans and fancy deficit reduction promises, promising literally trillions of dollars of deficit reductions. And what have we got but trillions of dollars of new debt, $300 billion just to pay interest on that. Why is this so? The problem, I suggest, is that all of the deficit reduction plans that we have had are founded on the idea of decreasing increases in spending. We all know what that means. What we have here is not perfect, but it makes the hard choices of eliminating and cutting literally hundreds, 500 programs.”