Political Quotes

“Well, I think you have hit on an excellent topic in that the deficit is troubling to all of us. I certainly don't want to pass on to my children and grandchildren a heavy and burdensome deficit. And we found ourselves in a position with the recession, with corporate scandals, with the war on terror, with an attack on our Nation where we had to respond, we have had to beef up our defense, beef up our intelligence, beef up our armaments and at a very, very expensive cost. Not even to mention our homeland security costs, something that unfortunately I wasn't here but I am not sure I would have been any wiser. That is one thing I don't like about our debate in Congress, we all have great hindsight. We can predict what we would have done, but it is hard to say at the time that we would have been right. But I think we let our homeland security reach a point where we just weren't paying attention, and so we have put billions of dollars, and rightfully so, into not only protecting our localities to helping with our first responders. We found that was a real weakness on 9/11. We are now talking about border security and border protection, which is something that is tremendously important to all of us. So there is no question that the strains and binds on our budget have been very, very difficult.…”