Bob Menendez: “as someone who voted to freeze salaries, to end earmarks in this budget process, as someone who has already voted to cut…”

“as someone who voted to freeze salaries, to end earmarks in this budget process, as someone who has already voted to cut $45 billion from the budget, I rise today in recognition that business as usual cannot continue. I recognize the critical importance of addressing our Federal deficit--a deficit, I would add, inherited by this administration, a deficit driven by two wars, both unpaid for, and the unprecedented need for governmental action to mitigate the wild excesses of Wall Street and American financial markets, excesses that were effectively condoned by the last administration, whose policies took this Nation to the brink of a second Great Depression and cost millions of American jobs. I never forget that time in late 2008 when Chairman Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, came before members of the Banking Committee and members of the leadership and described the circumstances that were unfolding in the country in which a series of financial institutions, according to Chairman Bernanke and then-Secretary Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury--they said: We are going to have a series of financial institutions collapse, and if they collapse, they will create systemic risk to the entire country's economy, and every American will feel the consequences of that collapse. I remember how hushed that room was.…”