Political Quotes

“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.”