On the recordJuly 21, 2010
What we have is foreigners basically bailing us out. As long as they're willing to do that. But pretty soon they're going to say, If you want us to bail you out some more, you're going to have to pay me more interest. And boy, it's going to be a problem then. This is a comparison. Sometimes it's helpful because when you start talking about billions and trillions of dollars, you say, man, the only thing I can understand is a hundred or a thousand dollars. And so here we are compared to other countries. This is deficit as a percent of gross domestic product. This is the United States here. We are third only to Spain and the United Kingdom in terms of our deficit. The United States is third only to Greece and Italy. You take a look at these European countries, and they're not just in nifty economic shape. In fact, I heard a statistic today, I don't know if you had heard this before, gentleman, but I was told that if you take a look at what we call the poverty level in America, a person in America living at the poverty level is doing better than a person in the middle of the middle class in Europe. That's what socialism buys you. I will say that again. A person at the poverty level in America is doing better economically, right at the poverty level line, than somebody who is a middle class person, an average middle class person in Europe. That says that all of this Keynesian socialistic stuff is terribly inefficient.
