Political Quotes

“the principal thing that people are talking about, particularly the President of this country, is a $600 billion economic stimulus plan. Yet here we are at the same time debating whether we should help a million families whose breadwinner has been out of work, who has been searching for work, whether we should provide them 38 percent of the income that they had been getting from their job to put food on the table for their families. And if we do not extend this, what happens to those families? Think about the faces behind the statistics. They stop payment on their mortgage. They have to pull their kids out of college. All kinds of suffering we cannot imagine. Yet we can put up $600 billion in tax cuts instead of providing five percent of that amount for people who would spend that money immediately. Any economic stimulus needs to be fast acting, it needs to be fiscally responsible, and it needs to be fair. What could be fairer than providing the unemployment insurance for those people who have exhausted their benefits? All we asked for was an opportunity to vote on whether or not we could and should do that. We were denied that opportunity to vote. We are going to vote for extending unemployment insurance for the part of the people who will be helped by this, but it is not the population that needs it the most.”