Dan Coats: “since February I have been coming to the Senate floor every week to talk about the waste of the week. Back in 2010, when…”

“since February I have been coming to the Senate floor every week to talk about the waste of the week. Back in 2010, when I made the decision to answer a call to run for the Senate again, one of the primary reasons for my decision to go forward was my alarm over the plunge into debt and rising deficit that was taking place. At the time, the national debt of this country was a little over $10 trillion. It is alarming to note that as I stand here 5 years later, our debt has nearly doubled. It's over $18 trillion in just the 5 years I have been here. There were alarm bells ringing in 2010, and those alarm bells were saying that we cannot stay on this course, that it is going to come back to haunt us someday, that it will affect our economy, that it will affect our credit rating. Someday the bill collector will be at the door of the taxpayer saying: You have to pay up big time or we are going to go into default. What took place going forward from that was a series of efforts--some of them very equally bipartisan by both Republicans and Democrats who were alarmed at where we were and wishing to come together to persuade the President to work with us and put us on a path toward fiscal responsibility. That work involved any number of proposals and iterations. We all remember the so-called Gang of 6, the Committee of 12, the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, and various others who had plans.…”