Political Quotes

“Madam President, midnight is approaching and a government shutdown is looming in front of us. I would say--as we can tell in this city--there are not a lot of things Senators will agree on, but I think there is one thing that just about every Senator I have spoken with does agree on; that is, we have a budgeting and spending process that is broken. In fact, the first bill I introduced in Congress was a bill that simply said: If Members of Congress can't pass a balanced budget, they shouldn't get paid. Nobody here likes to see CR after CR. CR stands for continuing resolution. Think about it. We have a government that starts its fiscal year every year on October 1. I spent 28 years in the private sector, and 13 of those years were with Procter & Gamble, a Fortune 500 company. I spent time in a small family business, and I spent time as part of a cloud computing startup that grew over 1,000 jobs. We took the company public. So I have had a lot of experience in budgets, management spending, and ensuring that you actually take in more money than you spend because that is all profit in business. Here in Washington, DC, we are now--October, November, December, middle of January--we are 3\1/2\ months into the fiscal year without having nailed down the spending plan. It is broken. That needs to be reformed.…”