Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to first address the bill we passed in the early hours this morning. It is very unusual to be passing a bill in the early hours, certainly on the first day of the year. And this bill had a lot in it. This is the fiscal cliff bill. There are a number of reasons that I supported this bill, but there are a number of concerns I have as well. I thought it might be appropriate to just summarize why it was important this bill pass last night, but also why we should also be aware that the bill has laid out a path that requires us to do substantial additional work in order to avoid having that path be one that leads us into a thicket. First, we do not pass this bill if the House does not get it done. It is being considered by the House right now. Then there would be a very good probability, economists estimate, that the economy would turn down in the coming year by somewhere in the range of about 2 to 3 percent, and so we would go into a recession. That means living wage jobs for American families would disappear. That is an enormous amount of hardship, and this is a self-inflicted political wound. So it was important to pass that bill last night to avoid that. The second is that one of the immediate impacts would have been the end of unemployment insurance for a huge number of families across this country.…”