Political Quotes

“I am a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, as everybody knows. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) is here with me. The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) was here earlier, as was the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor). This is going to be a first in a series of, I hope, enlightened or enlightening exercises that we do with regard to why deficits mean something in this country. I heard some of the most astounding rhetoric I have ever heard in my life when there are some in this town who say deficits do not matter. We are going to try to point out why they do over the next few weeks. Mr. Speaker, do you realize that today we are passing on to our children and our grandchildren an 18 percent mortgage on this country? We have literally mortgaged our children's future by our spending habits and our inability or our lack of courage to raise the necessary funds to pay for what my generation wants. The President has submitted a budget that is another $300 billion in the red. Let me just say why that matters. We already are paying, as a people, a billion dollars a day in interest on past consumption. If we do the math on that, there are 129.9 million individual taxpayers in this country, that means that every individual taxpayer last year paid on average $2,556 on the debt, interest on the debt, a debt tax that will continue to go up under these present economic policies that we are asked to follow.”