Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 90 seconds. It is not true, as we have heard on this floor repeatedly today, that both parties are addicted to spending and that the deficit is equally the fault of both parties. It is the fault of George Bush. It is the fault of the Republican Congress. Under President Clinton, a Democratic Congress voted for tax increases and for spending cuts, and produced balanced budgets 4 years in a row of such a significance that we were going to eliminate the entire national debt by 2012. The Republicans came in and without Democratic support voted for huge tax cuts, for two unfunded wars, and for doubling the Pentagon's budget without increasing taxes to pay for it. That generated the huge deficit we have. The deficit was also generated by the fact that, because of, arguably, Republican deregulatory policies, we got into this huge depression caused by Wall Street, and that increased the deficit. In January of 2009, before President Obama took office, 1 month before, the CBO said that the next year's deficit would be $1.2 trillion without this President's having done a thing. The point, as I said before, is that nondefense discretionary spending--everything other than Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, veterans benefits, and interest on the debt--has not increased since 2001 when adjusted for inflation and population growth. So that is not the source of our budget deficit.…”