Jerry Moran: “This is a Republican-contrived bankruptcy. A decade ago, the majority party inherited surpluses as far as the eye could…”

“This is a Republican-contrived bankruptcy. A decade ago, the majority party inherited surpluses as far as the eye could see, and then they promptly took away the revenue that enabled us to balance our budget. They crippled this country with deep tax cuts. In fact, we have the lowest revenue that we've had at any time since before Medicare and basically at any time since before the Great Depression. What this is going to do and the reason we oppose this is that if this were on the books, we never would have had the ability to rescue the world from the Great Depression in the 1930s; we never would have had the ability to win the war for democracy in the 1940s; we never would have created a permanent American middle class with the GI Bill that provided the working class with homes and higher education, we never would have won the race to space for the free world in the sixties; we never would have been able to establish Medicare and civil rights legislation in the mid-sixties. And certainly, had we been stuck in this fiscal straightjacket, President Clinton never could have raised the needed revenue to balance the budget so we never would have been able to create 20 million new jobs as we did in the 1990s, and reduce poverty, and expand the middle class, and create all those trillions of dollars of projected surpluses that the majority inherited and promptly squandered.…”