Political Quotes

“yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, estimated that this year's budget deficit will be 24 percent lower than it was projected just a few months ago. That is very good news for our country. Let's not forget that just 5 or so years ago when President Obama came into office in January 2009, he inherited a $1.4 trillion deficit--$1.4 trillion. This was as a result of two unpaid-for wars, huge tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations, an unfunded Medicare Part D prescription drug program written by the drug and insurance companies and, of course, the terrible recession, which resulted in less revenue coming into the Federal Government. We experienced 4 straight years of deficits above $1 trillion. This year the CBO projects the deficit will just be $642 billion. Now, $642 billion is a lot of money. It is a large deficit. We have to continue working on that issue. But, clearly, for a variety of reasons we have made substantial progress, and we should be proud of that. By 2015, the CBO is projecting that Federal deficit will total just 2.1 percent of GDP, exactly what those folks involved with Simpson and Bowles told us we needed to achieve in order to be fiscally sustainable over the long term. So the good news is that we have made significant progress on deficit reduction. We should be proud of that.…”