Political Quotes

“I thank Ranking Member Slaughter for yielding me this time and rise in strong opposition to the rule and the underlying bill that essentially is the Ryan budget. I want to say to the prior speaker that the way you balance budgets is to put people back to work. This budget, the Ryan budget, will actually cause 750,000 more people to be added to the ranks of the unemployed. When you have 12 million people in our country who've been out of work for a long time or they can't find a decent-paying job, you can't balance budgets with that level of unemployment. This is an anti- growth budget. I want to focus my remarks, however, mainly on senior citizens and the impact of this budget on seniors. The Ryan budget turns a very cold heart to America's senior citizens. It ends the Medicare guarantee. It throws nearly 50 million Americans receiving earned health care benefits through Medicare to the cruel marketplace and rising health care prices. And it takes away the 10-year guarantee of Medicare's solvency that we passed in the Affordable Care Act. Forty-one million Americans over the age of 65 will be affected, as will 9 million disabled Americans receiving Social Security benefits. That's evidence of a cold heart. Now the poorest citizens in America are senior women over the age of 80 years. Over half of Medicare's beneficiaries earn annual incomes of less than $23,000. The Republican Ryan budget doesn't even see them.…”