Political Quotes

“I would like to finish my point. It is not about taking something away, except from the very wealthy, the fix from the deficit commission. That is what it did. We also added back. When you reach 80--and a lot of people may be running out of their combination of what their retirement was plus their Social Security--we give another little bump. So what the deficit commission did was significantly increase the viability for Social Security for the next 75 years. The Social Security trustees know we have to do this. Everybody knows we have to do this. The question is, Does this Congress owe that $2.8 trillion back to Social Security? Yes. But where do we get the money to repay it? Unless we can calm down the international financial markets, where we make major changes not just in Social Security but in discretionary spending--$50 billion out of the Pentagon, modifying Medicare, where we get the fraud waste and abuse out of Medicare--unless we do those things, we are not going to be able to borrow the money. One final fact and then I will yield back to my chairman because I have a meeting to go to. So far, in the last 5 months, who do you think has bought our bonds to finance the deficit? We ran a $223 billion deficit in the month of February. Who bought them? Was it the Chinese? Who was the biggest buyer? The Federal Reserve bought 70 percent of the bonds we put on the market. What are they doing?…”