Political Quotes

“we seem to be muddling along here with short-term extensions and incremental stimulus bills to deal with a failure as this Congress decides what we are going to do about unemployment insurance and physicians' pay and things of that matter that are in the bill. I believe this is an important discussion, I do, and I am worried about where we are. This legislation before us would add another $18.1 billion to the national debt. Just like that, another $18 billion. Oddly, that is almost the same amount of money that was tacked on to the Defense bill last year, and I produced a chart about it and demonstrated what happens when we get into that mode of appropriating, when we forget what our budget is and we treat everything as an emergency and just ignore our budget and spend. The truth is, this cannot continue. Every witness we have had before the Budget Committee--every one-- two-thirds of which are usually called by our Democratic leader, and usually about one-third are Republican witnesses--have all said our spending and our debt is at an unsustainable rate. They didn't say that lightly. What they meant was it is unsustainable. We cannot continue to spend like this and to borrow this amount of money on top of the $800 billion that is now being spent that we appropriated last year--$800 billion. Every penny of that $800 billion is borrowed because we don't have the money.…”