Shouldn't we be focusing on creating jobs in infrastructure, stopping the absurdity of importing $350 billion a year of foreign oil?

The rich and wealthy and large corporations have enormous influence over this institution.

I think when you have a society which is moving in many ways toward oligarchy.

We now have a situation where the top 1 percent earn more income than the bottom 50 percent.

We have got a huge debt. We have got to deal with it.

As a result of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, they are going to get more of their friends to be here representing.

Unless we rally the American people, working-class, low-income, middle-class people, it will be dealt with.

This year--ExxonMobil last year had a bad year. They only made $19 billion in profits. You know how much they paid in taxes this year? Zero.

During the Bush years, median family income for the average American went down by $2,200.

Well, or maybe the campaign contributors play a role.

About $100 billion a year in taxes are avoided by large corporations and the wealthy by going to tax havens in the Cayman Islands.

We all acknowledge that we have a very large national debt, $13 trillion, an unsustainable situation.

Should we really raise the Social Security age to 70 for those people?

But Medicare is part of our health care system, and as you well know, we end up spending almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other major country on Earth, and our outcomes in some cases are not as good.

That is a reality. It is going to be a reality in Europe, a reality in the United States. People are getting older. Health care becomes more expensive.

The American Society of Civil Engineers tells us that we have a $2.2 trillion need for investment in infrastructure in the next 5 years alone.

even before the Supreme Court issued its disastrous opinion in Citizens United, the influence of large corporations and other powerful special interests in our electoral process was overwhelming. There is a reason why the middle class is…

every day it becomes harder and harder for me to listen to my Republican friends who race down to the Senate breathlessly telling the American people how concerned they are about the $13 trillion national debt we have and how ``we have to…

I think we've got to move to a new concept, in terms of funding, research, and development, and it shouldn't be simply a market mechanism.

each and every day it gets harder and harder to listen to my Republican friends who race to the Senate floor breathlessly telling the American people how concerned they are about the $13 trillion national debt and how we have got to get…

But, my guess is that government is going to have to play a strong role here, because, left alone, industry is not going to make a whole lot of money in providing a product to people who make a dollar a day.

The function of a drug company, as I understand it, is to make as much money as possible.

It will not be controlled by one company, who can then charge a very, very high price.

And the price will be affordable to people.

Well, the point here is, we are rewarding and incentivizing the research.