Political Quotes

“I take this time to talk about the budget deficit and what we need to do in order to bring our budget into balance to have a credible plan to deal with our future growth in this Nation. I start off by saying the budget deficit is an extremely serious issue for this Nation. We do not have a sustainable budget. You cannot sustain a budget that creates debt at 10 percent of our gross domestic product and a gross debt that equals 100 percent of our GDP. We need to bring down our deficit in order to have the type of economic growth that our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy a better economic circumstance than this generation. First, before we talk about where we need to go, we have to understand how we got here. I am not going to harp on this, but I wish to make sure the people of Maryland and the Nation know how we got to these large deficits so we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. During President Clinton's administration, we balanced the budget. I might say, we did that--the Democrats did it--without a single vote from the Republicans. We were on course to retire all of our debt, and that was just 10 years ago. Then, under President Bush, we cut taxes twice without paying for it. We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and did not pay for it. To date, the war in Iraq has cost $770 billion. That is money we had to borrow in order to fight that war in Iraq.”