Political Quotes

“with this early session today it seemed like an appropriate time to talk about what I think are maybe three of the greatest problems that we are facing in the United States Congress in America outside of our economic security and our physical security with the wars going on in Iraq, with the challenge from the terrorists around the world. However, the financial problems that we are facing in Congress are also very serious, and I think we must reverse the rapid descent that we have been taking into extra deficits and overspending. So today I will talk about three areas: One, spending; two, the resulting debt; and, three, some of the financial challenges that face this Nation in the future. The first chart I have is the a chart representing the last 10 years of spending; and discretionary spending has increased an average of 6.3 percent, 6.3 percent each year since 1996, and 7.7 percent each year since 1999. So it is somewhat flat. It starts going up in 1996 and then it really takes off from 1998, 1999 averaging 7.7 percent a year. That is two, three, depending on the year, sometimes almost four times the rate of inflation. So you can imagine if you project that on in this kind of growths of costs, government is going to be eating up more of our income, more of our gross domestic product in the years ahead.”