Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we have now almost a 9-percent unemployment rate in this country. I think the good news is that unemployment dropped to 8.9 percent, but it is still way too high. We have a $1.6 trillion deficit. Yet, despite these enormous challenges, Congress still has not passed a Federal budget for this year. Our deadline to pass a 2011 appropriations bill was September 30 of last year, but Congress still has failed to meet that deadline. Last week, we passed our fifth short-term continuing resolution to keep the Government open. At some point soon, I think maybe this evening, we are going to be voting on the House Republicans' package of budget cuts that I believe threaten our economic recovery. After moving on from that, we will still need to pass another continuing resolution by the end of next week in order to avoid a Government shutdown. While we are debating these short-term continuing resolutions, in China and India and Germany, they are debating long-term investments in education, energy, technology, and research. Those are the decisions with the potential to shape the global economy for many decades to come. Meanwhile, here at home, we are fighting about whether we are going to keep the Government open for 2 weeks. This kind of short-term budgeting is not just hurting our future, it is hurting our economy today. Just last week, I heard from a company in New Hampshire about the effects of Congress's failure to pass a full-year budget.…”