Political Quotes

“I wish to thank the Senator from Hawaii for the real stories of how these sequester cuts are affecting folks in her State of Hawaii, and, obviously, my friend, the Senator from Virginia, has expressed those challenges as well. Let me be clear. It is not that our budget proposal doesn't make significant cuts in defense. We still add roughly $250 billion of cuts in defense over a 10-year period, but we do it in a smarter, targeted, phased-in way. The last point I wish to make, before I ask my friend, the Senator from Virginia, to close out, is I want to agree with so many of my Republican colleagues who have come and pointed out this is a responsibility we owe to our children and our grandchildren. We, candidly, owe it to ourselves. This $16.5 trillion in debt goes up $3 billion a day, and it is unsustainable. As Erskine Bowles once said: It is the most predictable crisis in our lifetimes if we don't grapple with it. And so we need a growth agenda. Two comments I would simply make in closing: If we look back at recent American history for the period of the highest economic growth, the period that we added the most jobs, the area where America continued to lead in innovation, it was during the 1990s. We had a Tax Code at that point that generated sufficient revenue to meet our needs without dramatic expansion of government.…”