Sheldon Whitehouse

The predicament that Social Security is in some say has something to do with income inequality...

To ask them to contribute a little bit more of the above $10 million salary to Social Security does not seem like asking a lot.

We hear folks right in this committee and out on the floor who talk a really good game on debt and on the deficit.

If less of America's income is subject to taxation than otherwise would be, the revenues for the program are less than they otherwise would be.

Health care cost is really what is driving our long-term debt and deficits.

If we keep pushing on delivery system reform, the bipartisan SGR, the 'doc fix' that we have included, we have lots of potential to dramatically increase savings and lower cost growth in the future.

We are proposing a mandatory toll charge of 14 percent on the roughly $2 trillion of earnings that are overseas and have not been taxed.

Climate change is a wise fiscal--focusing on climate change is a wise fiscal policy, as well as for other reasons.

We run a health care system in the United States that is grotesquely expensive per capita compared to any other industrialized nation.

If you want to look at this as a serious debt and deficit problem... it drops the major part of the deficit reduction opportunity...

If discussion of the debt and deficit is nothing more than a leverage point, a fulcrum to attack spending programs...

My belief is that solving that problem with cuts while in a recession has been proven by experience to be a failed strategy.

You have said before, Dr. Elmendorf, that health care is a very big part of our debt and deficit problem going out. Is that still true?

One of the flaws in the stimulus program that we put together and passed in the depths of the recession was that our rush for shovel-ready projects meant the only ones we could get into the pipe were the ones that were already on the books…

I am actually not an opponent of earmarks, I am a great fan of my senior Senator, Jack Reed.

I think it was Rule 89 of those Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior that George Washington kept that said the following: 'Speak not evil of the absent for it is unjust.'

I think that is fundamentally unjust.

It is a societal sorrow when somebody like that does not get the treatment that they need.

I appreciate very much that the Chairman has been willing to work on this and has made it one of the priorities for this Committee.

The Department that Attorney General Holder inherited was in a very grave state of disarray.

There are legal arguments and policies that fall outside a particular political ideology. That does not make them outside the mainstream.

I simply wish to make my amendment pending, and at a convenient time I would like to do that. There was a bit of an aura of good feeling on the floor when the distinguished chairman of the energy committee and distinguished Senator from…

The testing has just run wild--to use their word--run wild in the classroom.

We have other priorities. We want to cut taxes for folks, whatever. If that were to happen, that gives the Federal Government an interest.

I suspect we all agree that a school that is dealing with a population with a very high concentration of poverty has a real problem on its hands and that if they're going to succeed for the kids, they need significant resources to overcome…