Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we just passed legislation that would raise the debt ceiling. Part of that was an effort to reverse the debt trajectory we are on, but it can only be called, at best, a first step. We can all agree on that. Indeed, there is an article in the Financial Times, written by Professors Rogoff and Reinhart, who wrote a book that has gotten a great deal of attention and is widely respected, describing and analyzing sovereign debt and countries that have gone bankrupt around the world. They commented that much of what occurred in our debate occurred in those other nations. The other nations scramble around when the pressure is on with something like a debt ceiling, and they don't really change anything significantly, but they meet the crisis and tell everybody everything is OK. They say in this article in the Financial Times that everything is not OK. Indeed, the debt will increase over the next 10 years by approximately $13 trillion, and this package would reduce the increase in our debt by $2.1 trillion to $2.4 trillion. That is not much. In addition to that, Larry Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President Bush, has done some analysis of the Congressional Budget Office score of what the budget would look like over 10 years. He points out that they were predicting nearly 3 percent growth the first and second quarter of this year. So now we have re-analyzed first quarter growth. Economic growth wasn't 3 percent, it was 2.4 percent.…”