Political Quotes

“I just want to borrow maybe 5 minutes worth of your time just to talk about this issue of Puerto Rico. You have touched on it in different ways. You were talking about constitutional issues just a moment ago, and I want to follow up on that thought because I think that what is occurring here has far bigger consequences than we may realize. I would say that at a couple different levels. One is, Charles Dickens once talked about Christmas past, Christmas present, Christmas still to come. I think that this is a snapshot of Christmas to come if we don't watch out here in the United States. As my colleague from Texas well knows, we are at a financial tipping point, the likes of which our civilization has never seen before. We have never before been at this level of indebtedness in a peacetime situation. We are, again, about to find ourselves between a rock and a hard place, which is very much the story of Puerto Rico, as it relates to their financial situation. So you think about the number of 2025. In basically less than 10 years, we are only going to have enough money to pay for interest and entitlements and nothing else. You think about the way in which interest payments--by congressional budget numbers--are expected to balloon from around $200 billion a year to $800 billion a year and the fact that we are going to spend more on interest payments than we will on defense.…”