Political Quotes

“I thank Chairman Murray for her good work. It has been 4 years since we have had a budget in the Senate. This is her first year as chair of the committee, and we have gotten a budget moved forward to the Senate floor. I congratulate her on that. I note Senator Conrad, her predecessor, would have loved to have moved a budget forward, but the leadership somehow decided that was not the right thing to do. Indeed, they said it would be foolish to have a budget. So this is progress, and although we would have liked to have had more time in committee, Chairman Murray set up this system in a way that she was clear about, and gave us full time all day Thursday of last week to debate and make the points we believed were important, and so did our Democratic colleagues. They got to speak out. I thank her for having an open hearing and being respectful of those of us who had different views and were anxious to share them. My colleague uses the phrase ``responsible and balanced.'' But what you have to know, I say to colleagues and friends and Americans, is that this budget is anything but balanced. It never comes close to balancing. It never balances over the entire lifetime. It does not put us on a trajectory that would ever balance. It is not a budget that in any sense balances the amount of money coming in with the amount of money going out. It just does not. And we need to talk about that. I think the American people want a balanced budget.…”