Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. Yarmuth. I really appreciate hearing from both of you about your perspectives about what's going on. And the discussion we've had brings to mind a quote that I read by Abraham Lincoln, who was a good Republican. Today he might not be a Republican. Today he might be a Democrat. And it really addressed some of the fundamental underpinnings of the debates that we are having about how to fix things. What Abraham Lincoln said was that "the purpose of government is to do what the free markets cannot or will not do so well for themselves." And today in Congress and around Washington and around the country, we are beginning a debate at one level about what kind of changes we need to make and what kind of help we need to offer to struggling middle-class families. And those are two separate questions really. One of the questions is, what kind of changes do we need to make to the regulation of our financial systems? That integrated big financial system that, as Mr. Klein pointed out, deals with banks. It deals with stocks. It deals with housing. It deals with real estate. It deals with insurance. It's a complex system that is now regulated in Washington. It's regulated at the State levels because there are regulators in the States who regulate all these industries. And Washington, what we are now seeing is that we've had Depression-era regulatory systems that really took their eye off the ball over the past 8 years certainly.…”