Bill Lee: “If the gentleman would yield for a question again, I believe it was during that summer that a number of people started…”

“If the gentleman would yield for a question again, I believe it was during that summer that a number of people started focusing on emerging economic research, including research proposed by Professors Rogoff and Reinhart at Stanford University suggesting that whenever the debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds a certain level, exceeds roughly 100 percent, 1-to-1, certain things start to happen, and economic growth becomes more elusive. As I recall, we were nowhere close, yet, to the 1-to-1 ratio. Now that we have blown past that, what do you think that ought to tell us about the fact that, even as we have blown past that point, we are now being asked to raise the debt ceiling by larger and larger amounts or as sometimes----”