Political Quotes

“It's in that context that the actions of this Congress have to be taken into consideration because last December we passed an $800 billion, 2-year tax cut--not new tax cuts--extending the ones that were there. {time} 1930 Had we let them expire, which I think would have been better judgment, we would not be in the situation we're in. We passed $400 billion a year tax cuts. We now have a general consensus that we need, in the next 10 years, $4 trillion worth of savings, deficit reduction, about $400 billion a year, exactly the same as what we did in tax cuts last year. All of these cuts we're talking about are necessary to partially offset the fact that we extended the tax cuts last year. And the process was all up or down. You had to vote it all up or down, one vote, without any choices. We didn't need to extend all of the tax cuts. Maybe if we extended some but not all, we could have avoided cuts in Head Start, in food inspectors, firefighters and those kinds of things. We didn't make the choice step by step. It was, we have to extend the tax cuts, and in order to preserve those tax cuts, we're making the cuts in Medicare and Social Security and Pell Grants and Head Start, clean water grants, poison control, and on and on. It's in that context that these cuts are so regrettable.”