Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker and colleagues, I am a Member of the House who has felt that the calculation of the Consumer Price Index for our country should be a concern that was outside politics, one that was going to be nonpartisan. Making sure that the Consumer Price Index is calculated accurately is of enormous importance to, for example, low-income senior citizens who depend on their Social Security to pay for their necessities, but it is also important to millions of middle-income taxpayers, because our brackets are now indexed for inflation, and the tax brackets and the personal exemption, the standard deduction. A number of these concerns for middle-income people are affected by the Consumer Price Index. But recently is seems to me politics has been introduced to these discussions, because the Speaker has said that unless the Consumer Price Index is changed within the next 30 days, the agency that calculates it, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, would be zeroed out. I think this is very unfortunate. We understand why someone might want to do this, because if you lower the Consumer Price Index, you can have a no-fingerprints way to cut the deficit by about $150 billion, if you cut the Consumer Price Index by just 1 percentage point.”