Political Quotes

“I want to thank my good friend Senator Romney for taking this initiative and, basically, all of us working together. Let me say this. We were Governors together--the Governor from Massachusetts and the Governor from West Virginia. The bottom line is, we had the same balanced budget amendment we had to work with. We had to work on a daily basis, a weekly basis--whatever it took--to balance our States' budgets. We had to stay within our means. We couldn't spend more than what we had coming in, and we couldn't put our people in debt. That was something I thought was pretty simple because it is the same thing you do in your personal life, the same thing you do in your small business or large corporation: You live within your means. If you are going to grow, then you grow, basically, in a balanced way. As Senator Romney has said, our debt is almost $23 trillion. You can look back through history when we have hit these numbers, but then if you look back, during the war, we weren't worried about balancing the budget during the war. We were worrying about whether we would survive as nation, and we did. Coming out of that war, we had over 100 percent debt to GDP. We were able to bring that back down and work in a prudent manner. Then it ballooned up. Let me tell you how I signed on to Bowles-Simpson. If you look at recent history, the last time--and the only time for 40 years--we balanced the budget was in 1997, up to 2001.…”