Political Quotes

“I would simply say--we have the ranking member of the Budget Committee here too--that it strikes me that there were probably lots of other budget gimmicks in the health care law that are going to come to the surface in the same way this CLASS Act gimmick has. The Senator from Arizona pointed out they tried to understate the true cost by taking a lot of savings in the early years as people were paying premiums, knowing full well in the outyears it was going to add billions of dollars to the deficit. So it was a gimmick that was used, again, to make this salable to the American people and salable here. In spite of that, there was still a majority of Senators who voted again against this, who actually voted to strike the provision from the health care bill in December of 2009 when I offered that amendment. It seems to me at least we ought to have bipartisan support now that everyone has come out and recognized what we were trying to tell them in advance: this doesn't work, it was a gimmick, and we ought to get it off the books. I ask my colleague, the ranking member of the Budget Committee, about this budget gimmick that was used. Is it illogical to think if we have this $2.5 trillion expansion of government in the form of this new health care bill that somehow it is going to reduce the Federal deficit because that was the argument that was made at the time, and that is one of the reasons they were able to make that argument?…”