Political Quotes

“I stand today to discuss and strongly support my bill, S. 101, the State and Local Government Bailout Prevention Act. I urge all of us to unite to pass this bill expeditiously. Let me briefly explain what it is about. I first introduced this bill in early 2011, February 2011, because two things were happening. First of all, several significant State and local entities were teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. At the same time, the Federal Government--things in Washington--was in a horrible state fiscally, such that we could clearly not afford to take on more spending, more debt, more responsibility. I wanted to pass legislation that would make it crystal clear that neither we, the Congress, nor the Treasury Department, nor the Federal Reserve, nor any other Federal entity was going to bail out State or local governments that had acted irresponsibly and tipped into bankruptcy. Things have not gotten better since then. In fact, in many ways things have gotten worse, and very recently, just in the last few weeks, the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy--the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Other large States and local communities are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Many States are in a horrible fiscal situation, such as California and Illinois. Meanwhile, we are not in a fundamentally more sound place here in Washington at the Federal level.…”