Political Quotes

“I am here because I serve on the conference committee that is charged with negotiating a bipartisan budget deal. The Democrats have come to the table with a Senate-passed budget. The Presiding Officer will remember the long all-night ordeal of that budget. Our budget replaces the dumb and harmful sequester cuts with balanced deficit reduction. If fact, you do not get much more balanced than the Democratic program. It is half from spending cuts and half from closing loopholes in the Tax Code. Our proposal would add almost $2 trillion more of deficit reduction to the $2.5 trillion we have already done so far. Let's look at what we have done so far. Of the $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction to date, about $1.5 trillion has come from cuts in what we call discretionary spending; the spending that Congress approves each year that funds most government operations including our military. This is the $1.5 trillion in cuts out of all of the $12.6 trillion in spending. We got another $600 billion in revenue, mostly from letting the Bush tax cuts expire for very high-income taxpayers. So this thin red line is the additional $600 billion in revenue compared to the existing revenue of the country. As you will see, we have cut far more in spending than we have added in revenues going into this budget discussion. The remainder of the $2.5 trillion comes from the interest savings that are associated with those, just to make the numbers true up.…”