Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. As best I can discern, the argument about the HAMP program is we should terminate it because it's run inefficiently. That seems a fairly strange argument for most of us around here because we know that there are inefficiencies in every department of the government. If you use that as the touchstone for terminating programs, we would close down the entire Defense Department; we would close down the Department of Commerce; we would close down the Department of Health and Human Services. We would go right down the list and close them all because every one of the departments and every program has some inefficiencies in them. You don't solve the problem by closing a program. You solve the problem by trying to correct the problems that exists. This is a whole new philosophy for this group of people, because when the Securities and Exchange Commission was not equipped to fine the Bernie Madoff episode, their answer to it was let's cut out the SEC or let's reduce this budget, not make it more efficient so that it can stop the kind of fraud and abuse that was taking place, let's just starve it to death. That's the same philosophy that's being applied in this context, Mr. Chairman. Because the program is inefficient, which all of us agree it has been, their answer is let's close it down.…”