Political Quotes

“I am going to take a few minutes to talk about why the events of the last 24 hours drive home how valuable it would be to have a House-Senate budget conference begin to meet and to deal with the extraordinary set of fiscal challenges our country has in front of us. As the President of the Senate knows, a number of Senators on our side have been trying to get a budget conference with the House. It has been several months since the budget resolutions in the respective bodies, in effect, have been set in motion. I want to talk about what has happened in the last 24 hours because it again drives home how valuable it would be for the Senate and the House to move to a budget conference at this time. Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office--of course, our official arbiter of official numbers and trends--made public a new report showing there has been a significant reduction in the budget deficit. In fact, their analysis shows there has been something like a 24- percent reduction from what was estimated a few months ago. If we couple that new evidence from the Congressional Budget Office with the fact that consumers continue to spend--which is certainly encouraging--the housing market coming back, employers adding 165,000 jobs in April, all of this drives home that in the short term the economy is picking up and we are making real progress.…”