Political Quotes

“Madam President, I wish to show two other charts. This is not new information, but I think it is pretty dramatic in its presentation, the level of the massive addition of Federal debt at levels we have never seen before. We are looking at $1.4 trillion in deficits. That is the annual addition. We have not seen numbers this size before. We haven't seen these percentages since World War II, the massive war effort we went into in World War II. This is a critical situation at a critical time, and it must be addressed. The answer isn't to just extend the line of credit, which is what this bill--the base bill extends the line of credit by $1.9 trillion. It is nice that we have the ability to say: OK, we will have the line of credit extended by $1.9 trillion, but it doesn't address this, it just allows this to go on. The CARFA bill gets at this line and starts cutting that. It starts cutting irresponsible Federal programs. It starts cutting duplicative Federal programs and programs that have accomplished their purposes. We have things we are funding that were started 50, 100 years ago, and they have actually accomplished what they were supposed to do and ought to be terminated. Yet they don't get terminated because there is no culling process that goes on. The Federal Government hasn't cut its own funding system for 100 years. When I first came to Congress, we made a 1-year cut in Federal spending of 1 percent from one year to the next year.…”