Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes to reply to what the gentleman just said. The fact is, the reason this country is in such deficit is because of a deliberate Republican crusade over the last 30 years to reduce taxes on the rich in order to deliberately create huge deficits, and to then use those deficits as the excuse to justify large cuts to gut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and education programs that they have never liked in the first place but could not justify cutting without it. Taxes used to be 18 to 19 percent of the economy, of GDP. Now they're about 14 percent of GDP, and yet the Republicans won't increase it because we have decreased the taxes on the rich and on the corporations. The country is not broke; we're just not taxing the millionaires and the billionaires the way we used to. And the fact is, you look at the history here. When Ronald Reagan took over as President of the United States, the entire national debt of the United States accumulated from George Washington through Jimmy Carter was less than $800 billion. Then you had 12 years of Reagan and the first Bush cutting taxes on the rich. When Clinton took over, you had a $4.3 trillion deficit, and it was expected to go much higher. We made the tough decisions; we voted for increased taxes in 1993 and for cutting the budget. And when Clinton left office 8 years later, the budget had been balanced.…”