Political Quotes

“it is important to review a little of the chronology leading to today's vote. Only last year, at the end of the Clinton administration, there was a $5.6 trillion surplus forecast. Now, the majority of Democrats said, let us be a little fiscally disciplined here. Let us wait and see if these numbers hold up. But the Republican majority, in a rush to judgment, went ahead and enacted a $2 trillion tax cut. Here we are, the very next year, $4 trillion of the surplus is gone and we realize that that money is going to have to come out of Social Security and Medicare trust funds, even though five times we all voted for a lockbox on Social Security and Medicare. The lockbox is broken. Today we are going to cut taxes between the years 2011 to 2020 by another $4 trillion, $7 trillion when you count interest payments on the increased public debt it will create, and virtually all of that money is going to have to be paid for by Social Security and Medicare. Yet in that decade, from 2011 to 2020, we are going to see another 40 million people join the retirement rolls. This is fiscally irresponsible. It is not right. We would not do it in our own family, and we should not do it to the American family.”