Political Quotes

“The Republicans call this bill a ``balanced budget amendment,'' but it is not balanced because it will blow a hole in the budget of vital programs that millions of Americans depend on. It's unbalanced, unneeded, and will undermine our struggling economy. Republicans want us to mangle the Constitution because they cannot manage this institution. This amendment is a means to an end. It's a means for Republicans to end Medicare, to end Social Security and Medicaid, to end every antipoverty program. And why? Because they harbor an ancient animosity towards all of those programs. And their plan is to leave them as debt-soaked relics of an era where we actually cared about poor people, the elderly in our country, because the Republican plan will cut critical health care and antipoverty programs, put them on a starvation diet, and leave vulnerable Americans with the crumbs. Our economy now has a 9 percent unemployment rate. You know what that means? It means that 46 million Americans today live in poverty. Do you want to know what poverty is in America in 2011? That's a family of four living on $22,000 a year. There are almost 9 million families living at or below the poverty line, including 15.5 million children. That means that one in five children in our country are living in poverty. Those are the programs that they want to cut here today, for the poorest children in America in 2011. There are almost 50 million Americans at risk of not having enough food.…”