Political Quotes

“Just in closing, the gentlelady pointed out that bad things happen if we go over the cliff. Bad things are going to happen if we get serious about deficit reduction. The only way you can deal with deficit reduction is to raise somebody's taxes or to cut somebody's spending. It's going to be unpleasant. Until you recognize that arithmetic reality, we're not going to make any progress. You're not going to be popular doing deficit reductions, but we have choices to make. We can do this without cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, the social safety net, or investments in our future. We have a list of ways of doing it, with specifics. Now, we're willing to compromise, of course, but you can't compromise by reducing the size of government with unspecified cuts. Until you specify them, you can't have a discussion. You can't have unspecified revenues that don't involve rate increases when we don't know what you're talking about. We can't compromise on that because there is no proposal to compromise. We need specifics. We cannot allow people to try to get past a scheme where you extend the tax cuts at a huge price and then come back next year and try to pay for them and notice that you're so broke you have to cut Social Security and Medicare. If that's your plan, let's get it all up front: we're going to cut Social Security and Medicare in order to provide for some tax cuts.…”