Political Quotes

“Madam President, I wish to briefly comment about the Pryor amendment that has been offered as an alternate, a side-by-side, or cover amendment to the Sessions-McCaskill amendment that would take the budget limits that were passed by this Congress and make those more difficult to violate by creating a two-thirds vote for it. I would say a couple of things about the Pryor amendment. It is not good and we should not vote for it. It pretends to have good motives, and maybe it does have good motives. But in fact it would allow $62 billion more in spending over 3 years than the McCaskill- Sessions amendment. It would instruct the deficit commission to propose tax increases and entitlement cuts to pay for increases in discretionary spending. The deficit commission was not meant for raising taxes and cutting entitlements to pay for new discretionary spending increases. The whole purpose of that was to figure out a way to deal with the surging entitlements that are growing out of control and to contain their growth. How are we going to do that? We are going to do it two ways, primarily. I suppose they will propose some sort of tax increases, increase in Social Security withholding or increase in Medicare withholding, and they will cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. That is what real life is. But this would instruct the commission to cut entitlement benefits, Medicare, and Social Security, to increase taxes, and use it to fund more discretionary spending. That is not good.…”