Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to speak on two or three topics, the first of which is the statutory debt limit. We heard the Treasury Secretary today say that essentially early, late July would be the last time at which we could manipulate things to not surpass our debt limit. I wanted to ask the rhetorical question: What does the statutory debt limit mean? What it means is we put into law a limitation on ourselves on the amount of money we can borrow. President Bush--I believe my facts are correct--asked for the debt limit to be extended seven times. This will be the second under President Obama's leadership. It has been extended multitudes of times prior to that. As a physician I am querying myself to ask the question: Why do we put a limit on our debt when every time it comes up, we raise the limit again? The answer to that question is the limit does not mean anything because we continue to disregard the difficulty we are in. If a debt limit meant something, we would make changes and take actions to limit the amount of money we are spending so we would not break the debt limit or have to raise the debt limit. As a physician, when I think about the debt limit, the debt limit is a symptom of simply another problem. That other problem is that we in Congress--this Congress, the Congress before this, and the 10, 20 Congresses before that--have not taken seriously the idea that this country has to live within its means. In fact, we are not living within our means.…”