Political Quotes

“you know we are at the starting gate of a new era, I think, in the U.S. Congress of trying to look at what is reasonable and what is practical on the way we pay/spend taxpayers' dollars. We have just finished a debate and both sides have agreed that somehow Government is taking too much of the hard-earned money out of working families' pockets, so we are in a new attitude saying that too big a Government and too much taxes is bad for the people and it is bad for the economy. I think as we look over some of the weaknesses of this budget agreement, I suspect a couple of the areas that I would put at the top of the list are the way we have dealt and tried to figure out solutions for the reduction in spending of entitlement programs. Entitlement programs next year will use up 53 percent of the total Federal budget, and you know for a Congress that was developed and given the responsibility of not only deciding how much money was going to be spent and how it would be spent to evolve in today's situation where Congress really only has control of about 17 percent of the budget; if you consider that the 17 percent that goes into defense spending is almost on automatic pilot, because there is seldom a disagreement of more than a plus or minus 10 percent deviation between the hawks and the doves and the Republicans and the Democrats, we are left with discretionary spending that represents just under 17 percent of the Federal budget.”