Political Quotes

“what I am getting at is, I remember, as the gentleman does, when the Clinton administration acquired a substantial surplus and was projecting at the end of the year 2000 about $5.5 trillion of surplus. To meet the Social Security obligations for the next 75 years, what they were going to do is to take the Social Security surplus and put it back into the Social Security trust funds, so we would not have this issue with regard to supposedly bankrupting Social Security. All of that could have been avoided if we had followed through on those policies. Unfortunately, what this administration did was to promptly pay out that money in tax cuts. We have been talking about these high numbers, trillions and billions; in fact, I wish the people, if there is anyone watching at home, they might write down what $1.7 trillion represents. It is 1 comma 7, and then 11 zeroes. Mr. Speaker, $1 trillion is a thousand billion; a billion is a thousand million. This is an enormous amount of money that we have reduced our revenue by as a result of tax cuts, most of which went to the people who needed it the least. Now, what is most troubling, I think to many people that we represent, is the cuts that are going to occur in the lives of people dependent upon programs.…”