Political Quotes

“I am concerned about the way we are doing this. I voted against every tax cut so far. When I go home, and I have been home the last 8 weeks in a row, only one person has brought up to me that we need a tax cut. Only one person has said, and I ask them, How many of you in this room make over $300,000 a year? Not many hands go up in my district. The point I am making is the way we are doing this is what worries me. We have a pent-up demand in defense; we have promised the troops we are going to give them a 7 to 10 percent pay increase. We have all kinds of weapon systems which are out of date. We have an O&M problem. And all these are outlay problems. We have a procurement problem as far as the ships go in the Navy. I remember back 20 years when half our airplanes were grounded because of lack of spare parts. I remember offering an amendment to put $5 billion in for spare parts; $5 billion for O&M. Now, I voted for the last tax cut. It was a bipartisan tax cut. When I say the last tax cut, the tax cut that came in the Reagan administration that most of us were convinced by President Reagan and the leadership in the House that this was going to improve things. We ended up with $4 trillion worth of deficit. Now, we can blame it on spend, we can blame it on everything, but the facts are we ended up with a bigger deficit. I worry about the same thing again.”