Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from New Hampshire. She made a great series of points. One of the most dramatic, is that we should not be waiting. This is going to cost the Defense Department tremendous amounts of money. Private contractors may well assess against the Department of Defense costs for confusion and delays. I just want to wrap up with these three charts. One of the myths is the reason the United States is running the largest deficit in its history is the wars, the Afghan and Iraqi wars. We ran the numbers on that. The war outlays represent only 4 percent of defense spending. That is a lot, but it is only 4 percent. It is not the biggest part of it. In 2001-2011 it totaled $1.1 trillion during that time; 2001 through 2011 we spent $1.1 trillion on both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During that same time--this represents the rest. The red represents the remaining expenditures of the U.S. Government, 96 percent. It is not so that defense and the war have caused the deficit we are in. Indeed, last year our deficit was about $1.3 trillion. The entire 10 years of the war effort amount to less than 1 year's deficit last year. In fact, we have averaged over $1.2 trillion for the last 4 years in deficits. For one year, you could eliminate the entire Defense Department, all $540 billion of it, and you would not cut the deficit in half. You can add the war costs to it, which is a little over $100 billion, and it is still less than half.…”