On the recordJanuary 22, 2010
as we continue to debate our Nation's debt limit on the Senate floor, I rise today to review how we came to this point of serious budgetary imbalance and, in particular, how $9 trillion of it is Bush-Republican debt. At a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work and families across the Nation are struggling to heat their homes and pay their bills and buy their prescriptions and put food on the table, our constituents are rightly frustrated at America's lack of fiscal restraint. They deserve to hear the whole story. The unfortunate truth is that President Bush left us with a budget so warped and imbalanced and an economy in such disarray that President Obama and this Congress have had no choice but to run temporary deficits. The previous administration must bear at least $9 trillion worth of the blame. Let's roll back to the time when George Bush took the oath of office as President of the United States. In his first address to the Nation, he pledged to ``call for responsibility and try to live it as well.'' It had been a divisive election, and many Americans now found some comfort and hope in those words. They were to be disappointed. But on the budgetary front, there was good reason for optimism on that January morning in 2001. After decades of deficit spending, President William Jefferson Clinton had set the Nation on its healthiest fiscal path in generations.…
