Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio for his leadership in bringing us together to make sure that we can discuss the importance of creating jobs. As we discuss jobs, I think it is important that we put our job efforts in perspective, because a little over a year ago when this administration came into office, we were losing jobs at the rate of over 700,000 per month, every month; 700,000 jobs a month. And we reacted to it by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and we have slowly made progress, losing fewer and fewer jobs every month. But that is obviously not sufficient. We have to do better than that. But we have to put this in perspective. We were losing all of those jobs, and we found ourselves not only in the ditch with the economy, but also in the ditch with the Federal budget. We had a huge deficit which limited our ability to respond to this challenge. We are also shooting at a moving target. Just this week, the Virginia Legislature, my home State of Virginia, will pass a budget that will cut approximately $4 billion out of the budget. Virginia is about 2 percent of the population, $4 billion. California is cutting $20 billion out of their budget, a little over 10 percent of the population. If you extrapolate that nationally, that is about $200 billion that the States will be cutting out of their budgets this year on top of about $300 billion to $350 billion that they cut last year.…”