Political Quotes

“I guess many of my colleagues would like to ignore that, but they cannot ignore the fact that we owe the Social Security Trust Fund $1 trillion of unfunded liability. We owe our Nation's military retirees, including the gentleman who just spoke, $163 billion. We owe the Medicare Trust Fund $229 billion, and we owe our own public servants over half of $1 trillion. When folks ask me on the street to cut out the wasteful spending, they are pretty shocked to discover that the most wasteful thing our Nation does that costs $1 billion a day is interest on the national debt. Now, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) and his proposed plan to try to solve the problem for most of those Americans who do pay an estate tax would allow people to keep $4 million of their parents', or whoever left them the money or estate, tax-free, and we can do that for less than $30 billion. The alternative costs five times more.”