Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I did not intend to speak again, except after hearing my colleague, I do feel it is important to say--I am not speaking to the specifics at all in terms of a proposal--but I do feel it is important to talk for a moment about how we got to where we are with the deficit. Because it is pretty hard to listen to folks who were involved in policies that got us where we are and are now talking to us about how terrible it is as to where we are. I want to stress, when I came to the Senate in 2001, we were trying to figure out what to do with the largest budget surplus in the history of the country. I was in the House when we made the very tough vote to balance the budget under President Clinton. Unfortunately, for all of us--I mean that sincerely--rather than doing what many of us had proposed--which was to take that large budget surplus and take a third of it to do strategic investments in tax cuts and a third of it for investments in things such as health research and education and jobs, and a third of it to prefund the deficit for the future; that was a proposal we had--instead, all of it went to top-down tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. It put us in a situation where we had no backup, no surplus. Then we went to war with two countries and put it on the credit card, which we have now used for 10 years. Then we saw a huge new Medicare entitlement.…”