Political Quotes

“maybe I did not make myself clear. What the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) is talking about is a situational budget deficit. What most economists are saying now is we are in a structural deficit. That is a huge difference. If the roof falls in, sure you have to borrow money, but that is a temporary thing. We are not in a temporary deficit situation. We are in a perpetual deficit situation, a structural deficit situation. I might tell the gentleman, after September 11, there has not been one single adjustment, as far as I know, in your economic game plan that you put in place in April of 2001. In fact, you made it worse. You started in April 2001, because we had a surplus, with, Let us give the people their money back. That was fine, except it was all based on a projection of surplus, and the money was not yet here. And you have not changed anything. Circumstances have changed dramatically. We are spending money now that we had no idea we were going to have to spend on September 10, but we have to spend it now because circumstances are changed. What you are talking about is, you have not changed your economic plan to adjust to a change of circumstances, and God knows, there was one. We are saying we need to adjust our game plan to circumstances that have changed dramatically since September 10.”