Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about the outyear deficit that is in the current plan passed by the House last week. We have a promise of a vote for an enforcement mechanism to translate the idea of a balanced budget to reality that we have been promised to vote on by July 24. I certainly hope it passes when it comes up, but if it does not, let us talk about where we are today in the House-passed plan. The indexing of capital gains basically will put the revenue side of our Nation's budget on automatic pilot after the year 2002. If we learned anything about entitlement programs, we learned that beyond 1970, the early 1970's until today, we have had the entitlement programs on automatic pilot. That is the spending side. Our enforcement mechanism that I mentioned earlier will attempt to get our arms around the spending side of this equation as soon as possible under this deal. We know we have to do it. Can Members imagine that in 1963 every dollar that came to Washington, DC was obligated, about 30 cents of that was obligated for mandatory spending, either interest on the debt or other entitlement spending, and 70 percent was available for us to make public policy with? If we do nothing about the spending side entitlements in the 21st century, that ratio will be reversed. Over 70 cents of every dollar that comes to this town will be obligated.”