Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, there is a lot that the gentleman from California says that I agree with. We came here in the same year, in 1993. I have been working to try to hold down the increase in spending and thereby hold down the increase in the public debt. I hope that we can have a real debate on just how much debt do we want to leave our kids and our grandkids. It is a mortgage, after all. I feel, like I am sure many of us, just like any family or any business, if you are going to go deeper into debt and borrow money, there should be some plan to start paying off that debt in the future, not just let it perpetually grow and grow and grow. Of course, that is what happened in the last 40 years in this Congress. Republicans came in and took the majority in 1995, and we came in with vim and vigor and tried to put pressure on the increase in spending. I have heard some of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle suggest that it is the tax cut that is causing the deficit. Maybe that is true, if you say, look, we have no control over spending and we are just going to increase spending 2 and 3 and 4 times the rate of inflation. But if we are doing what we should and having spending increases more consistent with inflation in this country, then there would not be any problem of digging into the Social Security trust fund or any of the other trust funds. Let me say that our current deficit is the result of an explosion of spending.”