Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, this country is in the middle of a great crisis, entirely an artificial crisis created by an attempt by one political party to blackmail the entire country into adopting its program of destroying Medicare and Social Security and food stamps and unemployment and all of the things that many of our people depend on. But why do I say it's an artificial crisis? Because the debt ceiling increase is something we normally do--seven times during President Bush's administration. Some people think to raise the debt ceiling is to say we're going to borrow and spend more. No, it's not. You raise the debt ceiling in order to pay for bills you already incurred because of decisions made 2 and 3 and 5 years ago, mostly during the Bush administration. Not to raise the debt ceiling is like going into an expensive restaurant, having an expensive meal, and then getting the bill and saying, Oh, my God. I've got too much money on my credit card. I don't think I'll pay the bill. Well, if that's the case, you shouldn't have had the meal. If you don't want to pay the bill, you shouldn't have made those budget decisions. You shouldn't have cut those taxes 10 years ago and gotten into those wars 7 and 8 years ago and made the other decisions that piled up the deficit. If you want to have a debate, which we should, on how to change our policies in the future, that's for the budget debate. We're going to pass the budget at some point. We're going to debate tax levels, expenditure levels.…”