Political Quotes

“When you're talking about the budget, there are two sides of the ledger. If you spend more, you should tax more. If you have less in taxes, you have to have less in spending. That's how you balance the budget. One of the problems we've had for the last few years is people think you can have a tax cut and don't have to cut anything. In the discussion of how much tax extension you can afford, that discussion is almost unrelated to the spending cuts. If you want to extend more tax cuts, then you have to cut more spending. People talk about it like they're unrelated. They say you can cut it off at $500,000, rather than $250,000. If you extend more tax cuts, you have to cut almost 10 percent across the board in non-defense discretionary spending to make up for the lost revenue. At some point, people should conform their statements to fundamental principles of arithmetic. This is what we've gotten away from. This is what the Congressional Black Caucus budget does. It names how you can come up with the revenue. It names specifically revenue: the Buffett rule, the surcharge on millionaires, investment income like regular income, and naming specific corporate loopholes that can be closed. We show how you can easily come up with the amount of money that's left in the $4 trillion after the trillion and a half in cuts and after the war savings and after the expiration of the upper income Bush-era tax cuts. We can fill the gap.…”