Political Quotes

“I rise tonight to share some of my concerns about the package that has been negotiated between the President and the Republicans and has now been presented here on the floor of the Senate. First, I wish to emphasize the size of the decision that is going to be made in the next couple of days. This deficit spending stimulus package is a $1 trillion package. Let's turn the clock back to the debate over the stimulus package we had in 2009. That stimulus was about $800 billion--only 80 percent of the size of this package. That stimulus had in it direct construction jobs across America. Every community, every county benefited from an increase in production. It also had the making work pay tax deduction. It had a host of small business tax deductions, and it had direct assistance to our States to enable them to meet some of the crises they were experiencing in health care and in education, so we could keep our schools across America open during this great Bush recession. I have listened over the last year and a half to tremendous attacks on that stimulus package. Yet this is a much larger decision. This is a $1 trillion decision, and it is a package that much less thought has gone into. We have this package here on the floor, but we haven't actually gotten the paper in our hands as to what is in it. We have to rely on newspaper accounts as to what is going to be in it.”