Political Quotes

“I think the other reason that there is a high level of excitement is, and the gentleman and I have gone through this a number of times over the last few years, you said when they watch what happens to their money here in Washington. We know that for quite a long time, when the money went to the Department of Education, we could not track it; that for 3 to 5 years, the Department of Education could not get a clean audit. We are excited by the work that, again, we did on a bipartisan basis during the Clinton administration to put pressure on the Department of Education to work towards getting to a clean audit. We are excited by the work that Secretary Paige and his staff are doing. It appears that many of these problems have been worked out. But we have to recognize that for quite a while we had a laundry list of scandals within the Department of Education and failed audits. That again was one of the things, a lot of my local officials were saying, Just give us this money directly. This is what tax credits allow us to do. I think we also need to scale this. I am not sure exactly how we go after this, but the Department of Education spends about $40 billion here and K-12 may make up a little bit more than half of that, $24, $25 billion per year. Our tax credit that we are talking about here is less than 10 percent of that.”