Political Quotes

“Those who say balancing the budget would be extreme, I think what is extreme is a $1.5 trillion deficit. We are en route now, at the rate we are spending money, to a decade within which the budget will be consumed by entitlements and interest. There will be nothing left for national defense or for anything else if we keep on the same spending pattern. So we do have to do something. What we have shown so far is that fiscal restraint has been an utter failure up here. After Gramm-Rudman-Hollings we had pay as you go. That was broken 700 times in the first 5 years we were supposedly paying as you go by simply saying it is an emergency. Every routine expenditure became an emergency and so we went around it. So that is a good context for the Republican jobs plan--that everything will be in the context of balancing our budget. But then there are other important matters, such as tax reform. Historically, the one thing government can do to create jobs or to lessen unemployment is to lower the upper rate. Kennedy did it in the 1960s and unemployment was cut in half. Reagan lowered the top rate from 70 to 50 and unemployment was cut in half. Reagan lowered it again from 50 to 28 and unemployment was cut in half. And interestingly, as you cut the top rate, you didn't cut revenue. Revenue stayed at 18 percent of GDP through all the lowering of the top rate. What lowering the top rate does is it unleashes economic growth.…”