Kent Conrad: “I detect the Senator was blushing a bit when he suggested at the beginning of his statement that his party is the party…”

“I detect the Senator was blushing a bit when he suggested at the beginning of his statement that his party is the party of fiscal responsibility. Wow. That is breathtaking. Their party is the party of fiscal responsibility? Let us look at what has happened on their watch when they controlled everything. They controlled the House, they controlled the Senate, they controlled the White House. Here is what happened to the debt on their watch. They have built a wall of debt that is going to take us a generation to recover from. When this President came to office, at the end of his first year--we won't hold him responsible for the first year, although he inherited balanced budgets--the gross debt of the United States stood at $5.8 trillion. At the end of this year, it is going to be $9 trillion. So they have run up the debt $3 trillion in 5 years. If the President's plan is followed, in the next 5 years they are going to run it up to $12 trillion. Their claim that they have been fiscally responsible is unfortunately contradicted by the facts. They talk about the performance of the economy. Let's look at the performance of the economy. We have looked at what happened in this recovery compared to the nine previous recoveries, major recoveries since World War II. Here is what you find. Under this recovery we are running, on revenues, $127 billion short of the typical recovery since World War II.”