Political Quotes

“I encourage my colleague from Louisiana, my neighboring State, to look at these numbers. This is from published Treasury reports. The gentleman said this money comes out of payroll taxes. That is right. Most of the folks I represent pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes. We would raid the Social Security trust fund to pay for this. Right now we owe the Social Security trust fund $1.230 trillion unfunded liability. That is nothing but an IOU. Members profess to be for the military. We owe the military trust fund $171 billion right now unfunded liability. That is money that was taken, set aside allegedly to pay their retirement. It is gone, just like that Social Security money. We owe the civil servants, the Border Patrol folks, $534 billion. How can Members come to this floor and say there is a surplus when we have increased the debt, mostly through tax breaks and a downturn in the economy, by $221,158,156,000 in the past 12 months? What is the benefit of this versus the cost, because I know the cost is that we never repay those people whose Social Security taxes we have robbed, whose Civil Service retirement we have robbed, whose military retirement we have robbed, and whose Medicare we have robbed. Mr. Speaker, I do not think that it adds up. The gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) gave us some bad numbers last year when the gentleman said we had surpluses as far as the eye can see. I am giving Members the facts right now.”