Political Quotes

“Madam Chairman, I rise to disagree with the rhetoric and the mythology propounded here by the gentleman from Georgia. The mythology is that we have a tremendous spending binge that we must reduce, that the country is broke, and it's broke because we're spending much too much money and we've got to reduce the spending. It's simply not true. Twelve years ago, in 2000, we were looking at a $5.6 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, testifying in favor of President Bush's tax reductions, said we have to reduce taxes, because if we don't, we will pay off the entire national debt by 2012 and that would be a bad thing, for some reason which I won't go into now. He thought it would be a bad thing if we paid off the entire national debt. The entire debate between the two candidates, Bush and Gore, then was: What should we do with this $5.6 trillion surplus. How did we change from a $5.6 trillion surplus to the budget deficits we have right now? Not by increasing spending. If you look at the spending amount other than military, if you look at the discretionary spending of the Federal Government other than military, adjusted for inflation and population growth, it has not increased by a nickel since 2001, not by a nickel. What has changed? What has changed to create the deficit? Because if you want to solve the deficit, you have to know what created it to undo it.…”