Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman. Of course, we did have a balanced budget, as you'll remember, for the last 4 years of the Clinton administration. Now, there was a Republican-controlled Congress; but in the next 4 years, there was a Republican-controlled Congress, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Republican President, and we went deeply into debt. {time} 1210 We escalated the debt during the Bush administration by 87 percent of GDP more than this President has escalated the deficit. In nominal terms, as Mr. Camp observed before, the dollars are higher. That's true. It's because we are bigger, spending more money, making more money as a country. GDP is up. During the Reagan administration, we increased the debt as a percentage of the national GDP by 186 percent; 55 percent under George Bush; 37 percent under Mr. Clinton; and some 40-plus percent under this President today. So I think the gentleman and I agree that we need to get a handle on the debt and the deficit, but we disagree on how this happened. It happened because we didn't pay our bills, and we jettisoned PAYGO in 2003. As a practical matter, we jettisoned it in 2001. Not paying for things is what creates debt, not buying. If I buy things and I pay for them, I don't have a debt. If I buy things and don't pay for them, I have a debt.…”