Political Quotes

“there has been a lot of talk about one of the major issues we as a nation are going to have to deal with, and certainly the Presidential candidates will be talking about it during the next few months, and that is that we have a $16 trillion national debt and we have a $1 trillion deficit. I think all Americans understand this is a very important issue, and it is something we as a nation are going to have to grapple with. How we deal with the deficit and the national debt is certainly one of the most important and interesting issues we are going to have to address. What I find interesting is that when we talk about the deficit and the national debt, there seems to be, among some of my colleagues, collective amnesia. It is as if this debt and deficit popped up yesterday and we have no understanding of how we got to where we are today. I would like to take a moment to remind some of my friends that back in January of 2001--not so many years ago--when President Bill Clinton left office, this country was not running a deficit, it was running a very significant surplus of some $236 billion. That is a very significant surplus. As a matter of fact, in 2001 the Congressional Budget Office projected that we would have Federal budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion from 2002 to 2011. In other words, when Clinton left office there was a very significant surplus, and the projection was that surplus was going to go up and up. What happened?…”