Political Quotes

“I appreciate the Presiding Officer recognizing me. I kind of switched places with him earlier. I was in the chair and listened to some comments from a number of Senators on the other side of the aisle. I did not come to the floor to talk about this, but I just cannot help myself sometimes. I heard these comparisons. When they talked about the economy, it all started January 20 of 2009, and they compared that day with today. What they left out of that picture is when Barack Obama became President, this economy was going like this. It was not like: He is President. Now things will get better. The 30 days after he was sworn in on January 20, 2009, we lost 700,000 jobs in this country. The next 30 days we lost somewhere in excess of, I believe, 600,000 jobs. The point is, what happened for the first several months, almost before President Obama could take a breath, before Congress, the House and Senate, controlled by Democrats then, could actually put a program in place and put policies in place that would respond to this terrible economy bequeathed to them and to us by this sort of Republican economic policy. The Republican economic policy was tax cuts for the rich, two wars not paid for, a giveaway to the drug and insurance industry, a bailout to the drug and insurance industry in the name of Medicare privatization, privatization/deregulation of Wall Street, and tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. That is what got us into this.…”