Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we entered into this debate about the debt limit today. I appreciate the comments of my colleague from New Hampshire with respect to the overall picture of our financial and fiscal condition in the country right now. I think it is important to put that context out there because we are debating now a substitute amendment that the Senator from Montana is offering on the debt limit increase. I think that was originally proposed in the $650 billion range. We are now talking about tripling that--a $1.9 trillion increase in the debt limit--after having just voted on raising the debt limit before we went out for the Christmas holiday by about $290 billion. So we have this proposal on the Senate floor that would increase the total amount of indebtedness of the U.S. Government by $1.9 trillion. As the Senator from New Hampshire very well pointed out, we are looking at deficits now into the foreseeable future that exceed $1 trillion. It doesn't look like in the 10-year window in which we do budgeting in the Senate that we are ever going to have a year where we don't have a deficit that isn't in the $1 trillion range. We had a $1.4 trillion deficit last year and will have another $1.2 trillion deficit this year. We keep racking up more and more debt that gets passed on to future generations and taxpayers. As the Senator from New Hampshire pointed out, for admission into the European Union there are a couple of key thresholds.…”