Political Quotes

“I rise to speak about the vote we are going to have today at 2:30 regarding sequestration, and I wish to strongly support the notion of giving the executive branch the flexibility it needs over the next 7 months to work through this situation in a more graceful way. To put this in perspective for the American people, we are going to spend $47 trillion of your money over this next decade. It was incumbent upon a bipartisan group about a year ago to try to come up with about $1.2 trillion in savings over that 10-year period. Believe it or not, that didn't happen. The sequestration was a method to ensure that at least there was some reduction in the growth of spending. I do want to say that there have been a lot of discussions about reductions in spending. The overall effect of sequester over this 10-year period is not to reduce any spending but to slow the growth of spending over the next 10 years. We are one of the few entities in the world that don't budget off of last year's spending. It is not like your city, your county, your State government, your household, or your business. We budget off of projections and growth. The task a year or so ago was for six Republicans and six Democrats to come up with $1.2 trillion. It is beyond belief that this did not occur. The sequester was put in place as a mechanism to ensure that there at least was some slowing of growth. The first 7 months of the sequester is the most ham-handed portion of it.…”