Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I don't know whether the people back home realize how rare it is for a Democrat to be calling upon a Republican to speak about a bill, but it is a testament to the size of our fiscal crisis and the fact that we have a lot of very good, bipartisan type legislators in this building. In any event, our national debt now stands at an astronomical $35 trillion. It is an unconscionably large debt, which is the result of decades of wasteful Washington spending, and it is a problem both parties have contributed to. To put it in historical perspective, as a share of our economy, the last time the debt was this high was at the end of World War II. Last year, the Federal Government spent more than $6 trillion and racked up a deficit of $1.7 trillion, the third highest annual deficit in our country's history. One of the most frightening aspects of our out-of-control spending is the accelerating interest costs, which, of course, we can't reduce. So far in 2024, we have spent $870 billion on interest costs. That is more than we spent on Medicare or the military. It is way more than we spend on the military. To illustrate how profligate the government is, let's take a look at how much of each year's spending was borrowed: 2018, 19 cents; 2019, 22 cents; 2020, 48 cents; 2021, 40 cents; 2022, 22 cents; and 2023, 28 cents. We expect this trend to continue for at least the next 5 years.…”