Political Quotes

“Here is a fairly painless way--just more efficient management of the money we have--of paying for this needed program without charging it to the children. We don't have to go to the bond market to borrow more. We don't have to incur an additional $900 million a year of debt, a tremendous benefit to those who follow us. The question is, when will we decide to start being responsible? I am going to be offering two other amendments, if this one is not agreed to, that will give specific choices. Wait to hear the howling. In other words, nothing is less important than unemployment insurance. Said the other way, everything is more important. In other words, we can't cut anything to pay for unemployment insurance. Let's talk about that for a minute. Just through competitive bidding, if we had mandatory competitive bidding in the Federal Government--in other words, we will not buy things that are not competitively bid--we would save $62 billion a year. But we have sweetheart deals out the kazoo. We have earmarks that have noncompetitive bidding. We have contracts that the government does without competitive bidding. We could save $62 billion a year by instituting competitive bidding. Here are examples. It was recently reported that the Defense Department rewards no-bid work to small contracts for repairs at military bases costing taxpayers $148 million more than they were competed for. This is in 1 year on repair contracts.”