Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I offered, along with Senator Clair McCaskill, my Democratic colleague, an amendment that will help contain our tendency in this body--a bipartisan tendency, unfortunately--to bust the budget, to spend more than we state we are going to spend. It is a temptation that is all too real. We are faced with competing choices to spend and spend, and some of our Members just find it hard to say no. We have to be careful about that because each time we do that, the baseline of the budget or the emergency spending goes up, and we have gotten into a habit of it that is surging us on an unsustainable path. Mr. Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration's leaders, independent economists, and Republicans across-the-board are saying we are on a spending path that is unsustainable, that we cannot keep on. But I have to tell you, a lot of this is bad because we budgeted it; but a lot of it is bad because we break the budget and spend more than the budget says. We have a historical incident in which this Congress passed statutory caps on spending to support the budget. In effect, Congress passed laws that said this is our budget for the next several years. We have actual spending dollar limits in our budget. Let's pass a law that says if we go above that, it takes a supermajority. Our bill says it would take a two-thirds vote to exceed the spending the budget allows. Some say: A two-thirds vote? That is a high vote.…”