Political Quotes

“I thank my dear friend from Texas for yielding. When I was in middle school, we had a textbook for U.S. Government, and it showed our debt. The line went up and the line went down over administrations. It spiked in World War II. It was coming down in the nineties. This is the debt, mind you, not the deficit, the debt. There was a little dotted line anticipating we would have the debt fully paid off by, I think, 2002. Now, some things got in the way around the turn of the millennium, and that number has spiked. Now, we are at those World War II highs. As many of my colleagues have alluded to, this is a bipartisan affliction. Deficit spending knows no party preference. But the idea that, in just a few short years, we tripled that debt--well, added 50 percent, went from $20 trillion to $30 trillion, $5 trillion of that in the last 2 years alone. We were facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Those were dark and frightening days, and this body reacted swiftly, reacted in good faith. Yet, the good faith became a good excuse to just keep spending, keep spending, keep going. That catches up. The inflation that we are experiencing right now has many fathers. You have the challenges of unwinding over a decade of quantitative easing, and that money printer just rolling on and on.…”