Political Quotes

“The big question I think that we face here, earlier today we voted on a tax extender package, $600-plus billion. None of it was paid for, at least as it relates to what was done today. I think reasonable people understand that making these tax breaks permanent in a way where they were not paid for ultimately is going to blow a tremendous hole in the deficit. As we move forward, the people who will pay for the tax cuts that were passed out of this House earlier today, hundreds of billions of dollars--notwithstanding the earned income tax credit and the child care tax credit that, of course, many of us support--the people who will pay for it will be the poor, the sick, the afflicted, working families, those who need assistance. In good conscience, there is no way that I could support the tax extender package and go back home to my community and say we have just done a good thing. As it relates to the omnibus, I think we all have to ask the question, if the plus-up in the omnibus is somewhere in the neighborhood of $31 billion or $32 billion in additional spending, yet we understand that in the tax extender package hundreds of billions of dollars were unpaid for over a 10-year period and, ultimately, someone is going to pay the price for that--that is one of the reasons why we got something like sequestration. We got jammed as a result of tax cuts that were not paid for in 2001, tax cuts that were not paid for in 2003, a failed war in Iraq, a failed war in Afghanistan.…”