Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, today we did vote on the farm bill, as it's been referred to, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act. But as some of us have pointed out--and I attempted to establish through an amendment--this was not a farm bill. Eighty percent was about food stamps. It was a very brilliant move by Members of Congress back when the Democrats controlled the majority--the seventies, the eighties--in fact, after Vietnam, the post-Watergate era, the most liberal Congress until Speaker Pelosi took the gavel. They did a brilliant thing. They were able to take so much in the form of welfare, public assistance of all kinds, and put it into so many different budgets under the jurisdiction of different committees so that if at any one time someone went after one area that was multiplicitous, it was simply a duplication of other agencies' funds, then they could be marginalized and demeaned and have it said, you don't care about women or veterans or children or the poor, or whatever. It's worked well, in fact, to the point that we now obviously have about $17 trillion in debt more than we've had revenue coming in. Basically, we would be, perhaps, Greece or Cyprus, other countries that are basically on the verge of bankruptcy except that we produce our own money. And the dollar is the international currency, so it's allowed all this reckless overspending.…”