Political Quotes

“passing on to my colleagues and the American people a predicament that Congress is now facing related to spending. How big should the Federal Government be, how much should we tax the American citizens in order to accommodate what we think is important and necessary spending now. And one of the problems with the overzealousness of Members of Congress to spend is that we either increase taxes to accommodate that spending or we increase borrowing. Right now, the debt of the Federal Government is a little over $6 trillion. We have a law, though, that says that we cannot have a debt that is greater than what is approved by law, passed by the House and the Senate and signed by the President; and that debt limit now is $5.95 trillion. Yet the Federal debt actually is now $6.019 trillion. How does that happen? We are playing political games. There is a loophole that the last administration and this administration claim exists in current law to use surplus civil service retirement funds and pretend that is not borrowing subject to the debt limit. They use those extra dollars coming in from the deductions of Federal employees to increase Federal Government spending. The ultimate problem still is how much should we spend. When I first ran for Congress in 1992, the percentage of gross domestic product, spent for the Federal budget was just a little bit over 22.2 percent, of GDP. Five years later it was 19.6 percent of GDP.”