Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to talk about the intersection of national security and our mounting debt. Over the last 5 years, President Obama has had multiple occasions to embrace real structural entitlement reform that would help solve our long-term debt problem. One might wonder why am I talking about debt when the subject we are generally talking about is national security, including what is happening in Iraq and Syria. It is because as the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, ADM Mike Mullen, when asked what the single biggest threat to our national security was, he said: It is our debt. The President had an opportunity, when the Simpson-Bowles Commission released its recommendations in late 2010. As you will recall, this is a bipartisan commission the President himself appointed to help come up with a formula to deal with our fiscal problems. Unfortunately, once they made their recommendations in December of 2010, the President walked away from them and nothing came of it, even though we are facing, in addition to $17 trillion in debt, more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Perhaps it is because those numbers are so big that we have a hard time getting our head around it, that people have become desensitized to the urgency of dealing with our debt and these unfunded liabilities. But the President has never once endorsed any sort of reform necessary to deal with this challenge or to prevent a future crisis.…”