Angus King

I would invite my colleagues on the other side to talk about a tax reform package where the revenues were dedicated strictly to reducing the deficit.

If interest rates went back to 6 percent on the national debt, just the interest on the debt would be $1.02 trillion.

I think it is a discussion that we should have and continue to have.

Not fixing infrastructure is debt, is it not?

We are actually liberating people to follow the American principle of self-determination and creativity and innovation.

I would urge you to think about that, because it is one thing to owe $17 trillion, the question is what do you owe it for and what part of that is legitimate capital, which future generations should help pay for because they are going to…

I would urge the administration to continue to really look and work with us on structural changes.

I certainly appreciate your testimony and would commend to you three gentlemen to think about is there some mechanics whereby we can not only reduce the deficit but also make a credible reduction of the debt itself.

If interest rates go to anything close to historic levels--call it 5 percent; in 2000 it was 6 percent--we are talking about $850 billion a year just to pay interest.

I believe that in the long run probably the most lasting and important effect of the Affordable Care Act will be the very subject we have talked about, which is the virtual elimination or certainly the significant reduction of job lock.

I think the lesson to me of the last few years is it is politically very hard to do grand bargains, but if we keep chipping away incrementally, we can make progress, first, to stabilize the debt and then to put it on a downward path.

We will never get out of this hole, and I think we are facing a time bomb of interest rates.

Failing to support infrastructure is debt.

The passage of the budget agreement was miraculous because it did show that we could, in fact, do things.

We have not done a thing about the debt itself.

I think that is the wrong question, because if you focus on that question, inevitably you end up shifting those increasing costs to either the providers or the beneficiaries.

I concluded that it was an immaculate conception, because it does not seem to have any parentage.

Well, one example would be voting patterns by hour so that you knew how to staff and you could staff to the demand.

I think it is kind of sad that we have elections where very few people vote, and it would be my wish to have everyone vote who is eligible in any given election.

I think that probably the two most important elections in the last several years have been Iraq and Ohio.

This is an important issue. It is one that is not going to go away, and I believe that it is going to continue to bedevil us for some time unless we can find some resolution.

What we have now is it is like the legends of the Trojan War where the Greeks and the Trojans fought each other, but the gods were fighting in the skies.

I think the very first thing we need to do is to review the roles and the responsibilities of the agency and its employees.

One of my favorite sayings is, the plural of anecdote is a data.

Well, it seems to me that the integrity, the last word you used, is so important, because all it would take would be one disaster that would undermine confidence nationally.