Political Quotes

“I have two of my colleagues with me; the three of us were former Governors. My good friend Senator King was the Governor of Maine, my good friend Senator Mark Warner was the Governor of Virginia, and I was previously the Governor of West Virginia. So we maybe think a little differently about how things should work in a budget. Unfortunately, we don't aim for the bipartisan success we had in 1997. In 1997, President Clinton, a Democrat, under his administration--at that time we had Governor Kasich, who was then a Congressman, a Republican, and they worked together to get a budget. And, I might say, it was the last time a balanced budget was negotiated. The government suffered budget deficits every year from 1970 through 1997, when a balanced budget was finally negotiated. In 1998, the President, along with a Republican-controlled Congress-- as we have today--recorded a surplus of $69 billion and continued to deliver surpluses. In 1999 it was $126 billion; in 2000 it was $236 billion; in 2001 it was $128 billion. The Congressional Budget Office in January of 2001 stated in their budget outlook that the Federal budget over the next decade continued to be bright and would build on a period of historic surpluses. Historic surpluses are what they predicted. That was in 2001.…”