Political Quotes

On the recordNovember 18, 2010
The deficit was created by the Congress that was begun in the beginning of this century. The Congress in 1994, when President Clinton was President, a Democratic Congress with all Democratic votes passed a balanced budget bill that balanced the budget by the year 2000, and that balanced budget with a surplus was squandered with Bush tax cuts that cost tremendous amounts of money and a trillion-dollar war in Iraq without weapons of mass destruction and without a well-defined purpose and without the truth behind the purpose, I believe, of that war. And then an additional war in Afghanistan that was made the secondary war. This has created the great deficit that we have now, and you've got to correct that through income or through cuts. What has been recommended by the bipartisan panel the President set up bears looking at as a beginning. It's going to take some tough decisions, but we also need revenue; and the revenue can't be across-the-board extensions for the Bush tax cuts.
Said by
Steve Cohen
Democratic · Tennessee

Editor's note · Context

Cohen addresses the causes of the national deficit and the need for fiscal responsibility.

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