Roy Cooper: “we are, like all Americans, acutely aware of the terrible tragedy that happened on September 11, 2001. That changed the…”

“we are, like all Americans, acutely aware of the terrible tragedy that happened on September 11, 2001. That changed the world, but we should not make the mistake of thinking that it gave us all these deficits because that claim, that belief would not be true. It hurt our economy temporarily, but we were already pulling out of a shallow recession, and we have not been in a recession since. So you cannot blame our overall economic condition for that. What it is the result of, and again, do not take our word for it, read the reports from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative foundation think tank here in Washington; read the reports of the CATO Institute, a libertarian organization, and they will tell you, they will demonstrate to you that the Bush administration is the biggest- spending administration since at least Lyndon Baines Johnson and probably even way before LBJ. It has nothing to do with defense or homeland security, budget needs that are really set more by our enemies than by ourselves. It has everything to do with a wasteful and mismanaged and sometimes incompetent government like we saw in Hurricane Katrina relief. That is a waste of taxpayer money. That is a shame for everyone because no one wants to pay more taxes. We are not for more taxes. We want every tax dollar to be spent wisely so the taxpayers think their government is on their side instead of working against them, but we really have not been seeing that and especially with these deficits.…”