Political Quotes

“Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think there are some interesting points when we look at our debt, in trying to figure out how best to fix it. What we have been dealing with today is a spending bill of about 700 pages, but it does deal only with what is called discretionary spending. This is military and nonmilitary spending, and it is about one-third of what we spend over all. The other two-thirds is called entitlement spending or mandatory spending. So often people will say: Well, we can't cut the discretionary spending because we are not doing anything to the two-thirds of the spending that is mandatory; this is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and some welfare programs. It is true that they are growing at a rapid rate. They are growing at about 6 percent and the military and nonmilitary are growing at about 2 percent. So there is more of a problem on the entitlement side, but often you will hear people come to the floor and say: Well, we can't. We have cut all this discretionary spending, and what we really need to do is entitlements. Yet this is a bit of a canard, because I have been here 6 years, and I have tried to push entitlement reform and tried to push cost savings, but we have never had a bill come to the floor. So people say: Well, I am not going to cut this, but if the other were to come to the floor with mandatory spending cuts--how come nobody brings it to the floor? It never comes to the floor.…”