On the recordApril 21, 2010
What amazes me, Congressman, is if you looked out at the average guy in America that runs a family, okay, there's all these families all over the place, all over America. How many of them would be dumb enough to think when they're in hard economic times that what they're going to do is they're going to increase their level of spending. They're going to go out and spend a whole lot of money in order to make the fact they're in hard economic times better. You know, I don't think there are that many dumb people in this country that really believe something like that. And yet somehow or other a majority of legislators in the Federal Government fell for that scam. I think a lot of times people fall for something because they want to, not because it makes any logical or rational sense. But these weren't the only legislators that have been sucked in. You know, you go back to the days of FDR. There was a recession going, and he managed to come up with just the right policies to turn it into the Great Depression because he wasn't any genius on economic matters. And so at the end of 8 years of the Federal Government spending money like mad, his Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau comes back to the House here, to the Ways and Means Committee, and he makes a statement. We've tried spending money. I guess we've heard this before. We're spending more than we've ever spent. They spent nothing compared to what we're spending before. And it doesn't work.
