Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank Senator Portman. Again, I so value his experience. Being the head of OMB himself, he understands these numbers. What I have been trying to do over the last couple days is, I have been trying to figure out where is this $4 trillion worth of deficit reduction. I have a chart on the debt in the Chamber. I have shown this chart in the past. I like this--I do not like it, but I like this depiction of the debt. It goes back to 1987, when our Federal debt was $2.3 trillion. It took us 200 years to incur that much debt, and we just entered an agreement--I did not vote for it, but we entered an agreement to increase the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion, and we will blow through that in about 2 years. But if we take a look at the debt President Obama in his latest budget is projecting 10 years into the future, it is $25.9 trillion. In last year's budget, it was about $26.3 trillion. Again, I am trying to do the math. If we reduce the deficit by $4 trillion, one would think that final debt figure would also be reduced, and it simply is not. I realize the President is talking about a balanced approach. But you know as well as I do we have a spending problem, and that is what the next chart is trying to portray. If we take a look at 10-year spending, in the 1990s, our Federal Government spent $16 trillion in total. In the last decade, we spent $28 trillion. In President Obama's budget for last year, he was projecting spending over 10 years of $46 trillion.…”