We right now give $15 billion every year as subsidies to private insurers under the Medicare system. Doesn’t work any better through the private insurers. They just skim off $15 billion.
Here’s what I can tell the American people: 95 percent of you will get a tax cut. And if you make less than $250,000, less than a quarter-million dollars a year, then you will not see one dime’s worth of tax increase.
We start this new year in the midst of an economic crisis unlike we have seen in our lifetime.
Our resources may be finite, but our will is infinite, and I am confident that if we come together and summon that great American spirit once again, we will meet the challenges of our time and write the next great chapter in our American story.
Families across America are feeling the pinch as they watch debts mount, bills pile up and savings disappear.
Let’s not only provide a jumpstart to the economy and immediately or save 3 million jobs, but let’s also put a down payment on some of the structural problems that we have in our economy.
Insist that the first question each of us asks, isn’t ‘what’s good for me’ but ‘what’s good for the country my children will inherit’
Instead of having a set of policies that are equipping people for the globalization of the economy, we have policies that are accelerating the most destructive trends of the global economy.
To the extent that we’ve got a fiscal crisis right now, part of it is prompted by a bullheaded insistence on the part of the president, for example, that we should extend all of his tax cuts, make all of them permanent.
When George Bush came into office, we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually. When George Bush came into office, our national debt was around $5 trillion. It’s now over $10 trillion. We’ve almost doubled it.
I will eliminate capital-gains taxes for the small businesses and the startups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.
Slowly, but surely, we are moving in the right direction. We’re on the right track. The economy is getting stronger.
Global warming is not just the greatest environmental challenge facing our planet – it is one of our greatest challenges of any kind.
We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.
It’s not a choice between our environment and our economy; it’s a choice between prosperity and decline.
I hope we can all agree that, instead of continuing to subsidize yesterday’s energy sources. We need to invest in tomorrow’s.
I strongly agree with Vice President Gore that we cannot drill our way to energy independence, but must fast-track investments in renewable sources of energy like solar power, wind power and advanced biofuels.
Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.
I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real.
Someday, our children, and our children’s children, will look at us in the eye and they’ll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world?