Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Like last week, I didn't plan on speaking on this subject, so my staff is probably wondering once again what their boss is going to say. But I was thinking that maybe we could translate a little bit of what we are trying to do with tax reform, because we talk about tax rates, exemptions, exceptions, and simplification--all this stuff that is important because it gets baked into the bill--but we don't spend a lot of time explaining why we are trying to do what we are doing. The last time we had real, meaningful, impactful tax reform was back in 1986. That is when Republicans and Democrats came together and decided that the stagnant economy that I grew up in--I graduated from high school in 1978. I didn't immediately go to college. I moved away from home when I was 17 years old, and I was working. It was an economy that was not unlike today's. In many respects, it may have been a little bit worse. The environment was the same. Iran was behaving badly, and Russia was behaving badly. We had sort of the same sort of global environment that we have today. We had the threats that we have to confront every single day, and we had the threat to the future of a generation. I mean, literally, people had no earthly idea, if they were getting an education, whether they would be able to get a job because the job-creation numbers when I was 26 years old were terrible.…”