Political Quotes

“Thank you very much, and I appreciate your doing this. As our friend from New York has said, we need to be focused on jobs. The other side of the aisle is quick to say that you cannot raise taxes in the middle of an economic downturn, and then the next thing they say is we need to cut spending. Spending cuts have a much larger impact on employment because, when you have an agency and when you cut the budget, people get fired immediately. There is a more immediate effect than tax cuts, which you don't pay until later on. It has a larger effect. So, when we start talking about the jobs, these cuts will have an adverse effect on jobs. We need to focus on jobs first. We wouldn't be going through this kind of attack on our economy, on Medicare, on the education programs if it had not been for the threat to shut down the economy. This threat is unprecedented. We need to pay our obligations. We cannot default. It's actually manufactured, because never in American history has there been any serious effort to fail to pay our obligations as we've been going through in just these past few days. We need to increase the debt ceiling in the same way we've done it every year, sometimes twice a year--on average about once a year, sometimes twice a year--over the last 50 years. Just increase the debt ceiling. We should not be jeopardizing. We should not be having all this uncertainty in the markets with what's going on here today. As that saying goes, ``Just do it.''”