President Clinton was able to achieve budget surpluses despite a divided government.
It took the first 204 years of our Nation's history to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. And now we are doing that every 2 or 3 years.
If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.
First, the year 2004, the year past, the Comptroller General of the United States, David A. Walker, said that arguably it was the worst year in American fiscal history, clearly setting our Nation on an unsustainable path.
If you need to put your money in a safe and secure place and you want it to earn interest, Treasury bonds are safer than putting it in any bank as a deposit or putting it anywhere else, because they are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government.
Bush may be a strong leader in the war on terrorism, but on budget deficits he is missing-in-action.
We need to take politics out of health care. Congress will cave to pretty much any special interest on the subject.
In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.
Congress as a whole is less popular than it's been since polling was invented.
If taxpayers want better results from Congress, they must stop paying their elected officials for failure. After all, you get what you pay for.
Our nation suffers when Congress fails to pay America's bills on time.
Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow.
Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives?
True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today's politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game - it's not a contact sport but a blood sport.
The truth is that health-care reform will always be a nuisance, with version 2.0 followed by next year's 2.1. As long as it boosts productivity, it's worth it.
Any politician who's ever been re-elected knows that friends come and go; enemies accumulate.
When I first came to Congress, the party was supposed to help you. Now, when a new member is sworn in, he or she is told what their dues are - how much they are expected to raise for the party for the next election. It's worse in the Senate. It turns the whole place into a money machine.
Most of my folks back home think Social Security and Medicare are sacred commitments stronger than the strongest contract. And yet if you look at the details here in Washington, they're not even promises. They're scheduled benefits. I think we need to do all that we can to make sure those benefits are real.
The real problem with big issues like Medicare is that both parties have to be brave at the same time. Every pollster will tell you not to do that to get partisan advantage. Too many people here are willing to deliberately harm the country for partisan gain. That is borderline treason.
