Political Quotes

“Well, the Ryan budget is not going to get rid of Pell grants. Is that the level of debate we have degenerated to here? The Ryan budget says we are not going to try to balance the budget too quickly. We are going to do it over 10 years. We will reach a balance. We have calculated--and it is not disputed--that you can increase spending every year 3.4 percent and the budget will balance. You don't have to cut spending. When they talk about cuts, they are talking about reducing the projected rate of growth, and that is why we are going broke. That is why this country is losing its moorings. We have defined cutting spending as reducing the rate of growth. You cannot sustain 5-percent growth--5.4-percent growth--when your economy is growing at 2 percent. And the experts tell us we are at a new normal and we are not going to see 5-percent growth in the future-- not likely. We might have a year or two of it. Bill Gross and his group at PIMCO, the great bond company, coined the phrase ``the new normal,'' and the new normal is that a mature economy such as ours, with an aging population, is not going to sustain some of the 9- and 10-percent growth rates that new and developing nations that are down here can achieve. I think that is probably something we have to accommodate, but we need to have policies that create as much growth as possible. That is absolutely true. We had no growth last quarter--zero.…”