Dan Coats: “when I reran for the Senate in 2010, there were two major issues that dominated the campaign and that continue to…”

“when I reran for the Senate in 2010, there were two major issues that dominated the campaign and that continue to dominate the discussion and debate in the Senate postelection. One was the Affordable Care Act, now called ObamaCare, which was pushed through without any bipartisan support. There was a lot of concern among the American people about the impact this would have on their lives. That was an issue of intense discussion and debate during that campaign. The second was the plunge into debt at a level Americans had never seen before in the history of the country. It took nearly 200 years, from the beginning of our Nation until 1981, to reach the $1 trillion debt mark. That is a lot of governing. That is a lot of growth of America. But we were essentially on a path--including expenditures for war and so forth--that didn't take us deeply into debt relative to our gross domestic product. All of a sudden, in 2010, there was the revelation that debt held by the public was rapidly nearing the $10 trillion mark--a tenfold increase in less than 30 years. It took 190 plus years to get to the first $1 trillion and only 30 years to add ten times that amount. That was a hot topic of debate during the 2010 election. During that election, the American people came out in significant numbers and said: Get to Washington and do something about this.…”