Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I just heard the budget described as draconian. I would say that doing nothing, ultimately, is draconian because what the numbers show is that if we do nothing, roughly in 10 years we will be spending about $800 billion a year in interest alone--more than we spend on all of our Nation's defense. I could give any number of different indicators that say if we do nothing, we are headed for a train wreck that will have real impact on the very constituencies that my Democratic colleagues were just alluding to. It is not a perfect budget. We are having an intense debate, whether it is on the Democratic side or, frankly, even within the Republican family. I just had a conversation with my colleague, Mike Turner from Ohio, who is really passionate about the need to spend more on defense. We are still working out those wrinkles. But what I do know, in fairness to the chairman and what he has tried to do in managing the different folks that are affected by this budget, is to say: If you are in a hole, you quit digging. And fundamentally, if you look at our Nation's budget trajectory, we are in a hole that is going to get far worse if we don't do what the chairman and the committee have suggested. I would say, one, we are spending too much. And yet the President's proposal is to go from spending roughly around 20 percent of GDP up to 22 percent of GDP, from a historic average of, frankly, around 18 percent. We are taxing too much.…”