Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady for yielding. If we are going to talk about how bad the budget situation is now, I think it makes sense to explain how we got here. First, in the early 1990s, the budget had gone totally out of whack. The first President Bush got together with the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate. Unfortunately, we had to break his pledge on ``read my lips, no new taxes,'' and they came to an agreement and did a little bit to fix the budget. In 1993 after President Clinton came in, we did some serious work about the budget. We raised some taxes and got the budget under control in the 1993 budget. When you vote on budgets, they are tough budgets. President Bush to a large extent can credit his decision to address the budget with new taxes as part of the reason for his defeat. And when the Democrats, without a single Republican vote in the House, and not a single Republican vote in the Senate, passed the 1993 budget, 50 Democrats lost their seats. It was a tough vote. You lose your seats when you have very serious deficit reduction. But as a result of that 1993 budget, we not only balanced the budget in just a few short years, but we went into significant surplus and created a record number of jobs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average almost quadrupled. In 1995, when the Republicans got in control by demagoguing the votes that we cast fixing the budget, they came in and tried to undermine everything in the entire budget.…”