Marshall Sanford: “With due respect to my colleague from Oklahoma who has been kind enough to yield me a bit of time, what I am going to do…”

“With due respect to my colleague from Oklahoma who has been kind enough to yield me a bit of time, what I am going to do is yield to him, ultimately, and he will take the bulk of this time. I just was thinking the other night about the larger issue of government spending, and I would just like to walk through a couple of numbers here in a few minutes on its importance, because we have a big tax vote tomorrow. We had one today, and we had a vote before that, I guess the day before that, tied to spending and what the trajectory looks like on that front here at the Federal level. But I want us to step back for one second and look at the bigger picture on why containing spending is so important and why it is not so important in our kids' or grandkids' time, but why it is so important right now. I think it is interesting, if you were to look at the words of Erskine Bowles, the words of Sir Alex Fraser Tytler, the words of Paul Kennedy, and the words of your local fifth grade elementary school teacher, what you would find is an amazing correlation between all four of them. It was Erskine Bowles, who was, I guess, former President Clinton's former Chief of Staff who said that we are walking toward the most predictable financial crisis in the history of man. As we remember, they put together the Bowles-Simpson Commission of 2010.…”