Paul Ryan Quotations | Page 3

We must solve the problem in health care by curbing out-of-control costs that erode paychecks for working families and push quality coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.

We are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I've got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you're not listening to them.

The work ahead will be hard. These times demand the best of us - all of us, but we can do this. Together, we can do this. We can get this country working again. We can get this economy growing again. We can make the safety net safe again. We can do this.

I don't want to get into the 'who's a hostage-taker' discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It's a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it's really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it's a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.

I think its rather peculiar. It's not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision. But I'd guess you'd have to ask the Obama administration why they purged all this language from their platform. There sure is a lot of mention of government, so I guess I would put the onus on them to answer why they did all these purges of God.

If you're running for president, you've got to do a lot of things to line up a candidacy. I've not done any of those things. It's not my plan. My plan is to be a good chairman of the House Budget Committee and fight for the fiscal sanity of this nation.

In a clean break from the Obama years, and frankly from the years before this president, we will keep federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, or less. That is enough. The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth, or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government.

Look, I am not worried about Washington cutting too much spending too fast. I mean, the kinds of spending cuts we're talking about just right now are $100 billion out of a $3.7 trillion budget.

President Obama is the kind of politician who puts promises on the record, and then calls that the record. But we are four years into this presidency.The issue is not the economy as Barack Obama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but this economy as we are living it.

Look, only in Washington is not raising taxes considered a tax cut. Nobody's getting a tax cut here. We're not cutting taxes. We're preventing tax increases from occurring.