Political Quotes

“I notice it must be campaign season. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trotting out the age-old push-granny-off-the-cliff campaign talking points. It never fails. If my colleagues want to have a conversation about how to save Social Security, the trustees just put a report out this week or last week pointing out that it is going to be underwater by 2033. The minority wants to ignore that reality. Instead of figuring out how we are actually going to deal with the problem, Democrats trot out the same old story about taxes. By any objective measure, by any analysis by left, right, center, Libertarian, conservative, or liberal, you can tax literally the entirety of the top 1 percent of earners, but it can't possibly balance the budget. Literally, the math doesn't work. We can throw all this around in election-year rhetoric, but the truth is our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not just watching Social Security go bankrupt, but they are bankrupt in ideas on what to do about it. The fact is you have to actually constrain spending, discretionary spending, deal with the issues we ought to deal with on mandatory spending, and recognize the fact that we are $34.5 trillion in debt. We are racking up $1 trillion every 3 months. We are now going to crack $1.1 trillion of interest this year alone--$1.1 trillion of interest, which is far more than our entire defense budget. The fact is our retirees are going to have a problem in 2033.…”