Political Quotes

“We have heard it said that 40 percent of what we spend every day is borrowed. Really, $4 billion a day is what we borrow. People probably think that can't be true, that 40 cents of every dollar we spend and put out the door has to be borrowed from countries around the world and from others who will loan us the money, and we pay interest on it. In a recent interview in July on CNBC, Mr. Erskine Bowles--President Clinton's Chief of Staff, appointed by President Obama to head the debt commission--said this about the state of our finances: If you take last year, 100 percent of our revenue that came into the country, every nickel, every single dollar that came into the country last year was spent on our--what's called mandatory spending and interest on the debt. Mandatory spending is principally the entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. What that means is every single dollar we spent last year on these two wars, national defense, homeland security, education, infrastructure, high-value-added research, every single dollar was borrowed. And half of it was borrowed from foreign countries. That is crazy. Crazy. It's a formula for failure in any organization. That is the man President Obama chose to head the debt commission, a businessman who understands the threat this Nation faces. We can get off this path. Congressman Ryan laid out a plan that would get us off this path. We have to get off this path.…”