Political Quotes

“The gentleman from Texas says he gets asked all the time about the national debt. He can give a very simple answer--because the Congress keeps spending money and not paying for it. That is how you incur debt; you buy things and you don't pay for them. They can be all sorts of things. They can be Social Security, they can be Medicare, they can be battleships, they can be health care, they can be roads, they can be bridges. If you don't pay for them--it shouldn't be any surprise--you incur debt. Who spends money in the United States of America? The Congress. Under the Constitution, we are the ones who spend money. I say to my friend from Texas, he might also say, Well, when you create $800 billion-plus of new debt by cutting taxes and not paying for them, you have less revenue, but you don't cut buying stuff, you have more debt. $800-plus billion in December. I didn't vote for that bill because we didn't pay for it. Now, I have been in office a long time. It is easy and takes no courage to cut taxes, no courage whatsoever. What takes courage is buying things--and if people want them--saying, we need to pay for them. We need to pay for them so our children don't pay for them, so our grandchildren don't pay for them because, guess what, they are going to have their challenges in their time, national security challenges, natural disasters like Katrina or Sandy challenges, Ebola, AIDS, health crises. They are going to have to have resources, and we are spending them.…”