Robert C. Byrd

The global marketplace has no tolerance for undereducated, undertrained workers. We must improve our children's education and our workers' skills.

The dissolution of a once powerful adversary has made it possible for us to reorder our priorities and redirect our energies. We must not let this opportunity pass.

What good is a tax cut, Mr. President, to a man who stands in the unemployment lines? What good is a tax cut to a single mother who has just lost her job?

Mr. President, I do not believe that any portion of the peace dividend should be used to offset tax cuts. I believe that the peace dividend should be used to invest directly in America and in the American people. We simply can no longer…

Reversing the downward spiral we find ourselves in calls for bold action and leadership. We cannot afford to waste time with Democrats and Republicans positioning themselves for political gain.

I hope that there is more meat to the President's proposal for economic recovery than press accounts would indicate, for if there is not, his plan is like offering a beggar a bone. There is no real nourishment-only something to chew on…

Empty promises of a resurrection of prosperity through the mantra of election-year tax cuts are a sorry substitute for decisive and effective action now.

We rebuilt the world for half a century, and the West is strong and safe. While America will remain an international leader, the world is now more a collection of healthy Western nation states, and unhealthy and recovering Eastern former…

The time has come, therefore, to attend to our domestic problems and reemphasize domestic priorities. Over the next couple of years, we must shift our resources toward our own country and our own people.

Too many unemployed Americans are falling through the holes in the unemployment insurance safety net. Providing a meaningful program of extended unemployment benefits is long overdue.

Such an honor of sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States should be reserved for only those who are most qualified and those whose temperament and character best reflect judicial and personal commitments to excellence.

If we are going to give the benefit of the doubt, let us give it to the Court. Let us give it to the country.

We must not continue blindly down the path of funding big-ticket defense items that have either become dinosaurs or threaten to drain the national treasury.

I know that the domestic needs of this Nation have become the poor stepchild of the budget, and I know that if we continue down that path we risk becoming a second-rate America with declining living standards, rusting factories, kids who…

I would not be worth my salt if I did not attempt to represent the people of West Virginia, but I am also thinking of the Nation.

As I believe I said earlier, if I wanted to go crazy, I would do it in Washington because it would not be noticed.

There comes a time when the Nation needs courage in its leaders.

An attempt to preclude or limit a debate about how to best pay for the needs of our people belies a basic mistrust of the democratic process and of the wisdom of the people who elect us.

We are talking about cutting investment in America. Too long we have been willing to invest everywhere else in the world.

A truly new world order cannot just ape the old world order. A more complicated international economic system is evolving, and America will play, as has been amply demonstrated, its rightful, proper and, if necessary, courageous role. But…

We should not and cannot be paid policemen, hired guns in the postwar setting.

The time to put our energies and treasures into our own backyard has arrived. There is no place like home, and home needs our undivided attention for some years to come.

Our allies are flush with the fruits of decades of investment-a great deal of it investment by the American taxpayers-and their economies, the economies of our allies, are healthy. The age of domineering global superpowers is over.

I said at the summit that what we need to do is invest in ourselves-the Nation. We should take off our green eyeshades. We are not here just to make ends meet, to subtract and add.

While we bemoan the lack of public confidence in public officials, we have it in our power to do something about it and to do it this year. We can act. We can put down the tin cup.