Political Quotes

“In fact, we are often asked, how would we find additional resources in a budget? And you make a good point, that there are, in fact, expenditures that we would not make, that we would choose to use in different ways. And certainly, the subsidies that we offered, that the Republicans pushed through for the oil industry at a time when there were record profits, we are talking about $113 billion profits for the oil industry last year, and that is not revenue, that is profits. $36 billion just for Exxon Mobil. It is really sort of an extraordinary sum. But there are other ways that we would also cut. We would not spend some of the dollars that they have. There are enormous subsidies given to the HMOs for the Medicare prescription drug benefit. That has been talked about a good bit, too. Should we continue those subsidies for the HMOs rather than making sure that more of our seniors have access to prescription drugs and in fact reduce the cost of that program to Government? Is that the choice we make? We are looking at tax loopholes that still incentivize companies to ship their jobs overseas. What about closing those loopholes, bringing those dollars home, investing that in workforce development, for example? Or a favorite of ours on the Budget Committee is the fact that there are in fact billions of dollars of tax revenue that is not collected in this country.…”