Political Quotes

“I came here and asked the people in Tennessee to send me here in 1988 because I knew from my business and personal life that this country, not my business, not me personally and my wife could continue to borrow money every year, which is what we were doing then and pile up more and more debt without jeopardizing the future of this country. Now, here we are in 2002. Everybody knows from the budget presented yesterday that the country has physically deteriorated in a breathtaking way in the last year. We do not have the money that we thought we were going to have, that we were told we were going to have last year. And now we are in a position as the budget was presented by the Secretary of the Treasury to committee yesterday to be in the next 10 years never in a surplus position from an on-budget surplus number. That is to say, we are going to borrow money every year for the next 10 years. It is going to cost another trillion dollars. Let me state why deficits matter. Deficits matter because it is money you owe. And when you owe money, you have got to pay interest on it. Right now 13 cents out of every dollar that comes here goes to pay interest. They say we are paying for war. We are not paying for anything. We are borrowing for the war. That is wrong. We ask the young men and women in this country in uniform to go overseas and fight for us. We say no price is too high for you. We will protect you, give you everything you need; but we will not pay for it.”