Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I want to address a little bit the concerns about the size of the Pentagon budget and the efficiency and effectiveness. First of all, it is important to point out that the defense budget as a percentage of GDP is the lowest that it has been since after World War II. As our budget has grown and ballooned collectively, that has primarily been because of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and a variety of other programs, all of which I enthusiastically support, but as a percentage of GDP we are actually spending less on defense now than we have, as I said, at any point since World War II. The notion that the defense budget is ballooning out of control doesn't take into account inflation and growth. We are at a more reasonable place than some portray, first of all. Second of all, we keep hearing, oh, they failed another audit. What is actually happening is we are getting better on that point. We were not going to fix the audit problems that the Pentagon had 6, 7 years ago in a year or 2 or even 5. Nevertheless, just to give you a couple of ideas, Mr. Speaker, multiple agencies within the Pentagon are now passing their audits whereas they didn't before, including the United States Marine Corps. In another decent measure of this, the Department of the Navy broadly has not passed its audit, but 5 or 6 years ago they were only 5 percent clean, and now they are 80 percent clean.…”