Political Quotes

“I don't think he backtracked. What he said was, and what we have said continually is, on the revenue side, if you're going to have a balanced package on the revenue side--this is his specific proposal: he's made a number of proposals on the spending-cut side already, as I said in Medicare more than the Ryan budget had in his budget. The fact is, I will tell the gentleman, you have no specificity on balance. Nor do you have any specificity, frankly, on cuts. There is no specificity on your spending cuts here. They're conclusions. So I'm not sure how you think one side ought to be specific, i.e., the President, which I think he has been specific, and the other side comes with five lines of dollars that add up to $2.2 trillion, none of which have any specificity. As you see, there are no individual items below those five lines saying where you want to cut or raise revenues. Therefore, we need to get to an agreement, and this argument is not very helpful, I think. We need to get to an agreement; both sides need to get to agreement. But the reason we get into this conversation is we have agreement on a part of that, which will help give confidence to our people, and that is on the middle class taxes not going up. I would again urge, and then perhaps we can get off this subject because I don't think we're really enlightening our public very much other than the fact there are obviously disagreements; but they expect us to, and we need to bridge these disagreements.…”