Political Quotes

“first, I say thanks to my colleague from Delaware for the touching tribute to Chris and his service in the U.S. Navy. I am here to talk about our economy, what is going on out there, and how we can do a better job of bringing people off the sidelines and into work. They are needed. Right now we have an incredibly strong economy. We just learned in the first quarter of this year that the economy grew by 3.2 percent. That is strong and way above expectations. In fact, when you look at the expectations that were set by the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan group that analyzes what is going to happen in the economy going forward, prior to the tax bill being signed into law--that is, the tax reform and tax cuts from the end of 2017--they said this first quarter growth would be 1.6 percent. It is interesting. It was exactly twice the economic growth than was projected before the tax bill. By the way, before the tax bill, they also made a projection on jobs. Over the last year, we have produced just about exactly twice as many jobs--a little more than that--than was projected. The tax cuts and the tax reform have worked, along with regulatory relief, to give this economy a shot in the arm. That is so important. I will say that when you look at what happened in the first quarter of this year, the 3.2 percent is great, but it would have been even better had we not shut down the government.…”