Political Quotes

“I am pleased that the previous speaker welcomes growth. We ought to be very clear. It is growth which has happened in absolute contradiction to the predictions he made last year. The Republican Members of the House consistently last year made a set of predictions about the budget we adopted which have been proven wrong in a decisive way. The deficit is lower, economic growth is greater, unemployment is less. All of their predictions were wrong. But their predictions are of less interest to me than the relevance of this budget today. I am going to vote for this budget. I signed the conference report. It is a budget, however, which in my judgment significantly underfunds important programs. As we pass this budget, I hope we will begin to look at the larger issue. We have, I think, within the framework of the basic spending that has been within this Federal Government for years, done as good a job as we could do in deficit reduction. We were not going to get further in the area of deficit reduction without doing one of several things: One, we can, as many of my Republican colleagues would like to do, severely slash Federal spending for a while variety of issues. I think that would be a mistake. We need more money to be spent on the environment. We need more money to go to cities and towns and States to deal with clean water. We need more money to help them with police. We need more money to help provide decent housing for people.”