Political Quotes

“Mr. President, people in my home State are trying to figure out what they missed on this budget deal. It was announced by the White House today that this is a great job-creating achievement, but all they see is more spending and no change in the status quo. Everyone throws around numbers, but here is the one number people in my State want to hear. How much does it save the American taxpayer? Put another way, does it help us to balance our budget or to address the debt problem? We need two things to be able to balance our Federal budget: spending restraint and a growing economy. Right now we have neither. We have $18.5 trillion in debt and over $430 billion in deficit in this year. To start paying down our debt, we have to first balance our budget. The Presiding Officer knows very well that we passed a budget earlier this year that took the next 10 years to be able to balance our budget. Let's play pretend for a moment in this body. Let's say we put that budget into place, and over the 10 years we work down a little bit each year and get to a balanced budget 10 years from now. Let's take a guess in this body, and let's say the year after that we had a $50 billion surplus. It took us 10 years to get back to balance, and in year 11 we had a $50 billion surplus. How many years would we have to maintain a $50 billion surplus until we paid off our debt? The correct answer would be: 360 years in a row we would have to have a $50 billion surplus to pay off our debt.…”