Political Quotes

“But his memory is short; it tends to be a little on the convenient side. The gentleman has forgotten where this big debt came from. When Jimmy Carter left office and Ronald Reagan came in, the national debt of the United States was $700 billion. With Reagan's first budget, the so-called Gramm-Latta budget, Democrats over here warned that the practical consequences of that was going to be that it was going to enormously increase the debt because it immensely increased military expenditures, cut expenses in other programs slightly, and gave a massive tax cut to the well-to-do. Mr. Speaker, as a result of that, the national debt by the time that Mr. Reagan left office went from $700 billion to $4.5 trillion. It multiplied somewhere between 5 and 7 times. My Republican colleagues, in talking about debt, deficits, and fiscal irresponsibility, forget the fact that it was their budget. They also forget the fact that the Democrats during that period of time who controlled the House cut, cut the Reagan budgets by $49 billion, and they reapportioned the money so we spent less on defense and we spent more on environment, on health, on senior citizens, on education, and on things that are really important to the long life of this country.”