Patty Murray Quotes

During the campaign for re-election, Barack Obama at least made vague references to a willingness to accept $3 trillion of reduced spending in exchange for a $1 trillion dollar tax increase.

We cannot deal with the debt. The Democrats are not going to allow reductions in entitlements like Social Security. The Republicans will not allow one dime of additional taxes. We have a deadlock of democracy.

What we've been hearing over and over again is that the reason Republicans are opposed to the surtax is because of the concern of its impact on job creation. Well, if you carve out employers, you take away that argument.

And so we go over the cliff fiscally, and our Republican friends try to pin the blame on discretionary domestic spending, including spending for security. We pass budget resolutions that fall far short.

Obama has offered no solutions; his Democratic majority in the Senate has failed to produce a budget in 1,200 days; and they have both obstructed the Republicans' proposed remedies.

Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.

The debate we won't be having is whether or not the debt ceiling should be raised. We will not have a situation where people will hold the American economy hostage in order to achieve a specific agenda - at least not until 2013. So we think that is incredibly important as a matter of economic good.

Cutting spending is harder than raising taxes. Every dollar of federal spending has a constituency.

My biggest objection to raising taxes is that it feeds the government addiction to spending money.

Blame the Tea Party? Geez, no wonder Kerry did so well in an election. If it wasn't for the Tea Party, they would have passed the debt ceiling thumbs up; we would have been rated BBB.

The Farm Bill is one of the only bills that provides substantial deficit reduction that passed the Senate this year. It only makes sense that this deficit reduction bill would be included in a larger deficit reduction agreement.

You remember had this gigantic clock in the arena showing the size of the national debt. And Paul told America, if you elect Republicans, we can fix that. But, if Paul Ryan was being honest, he would've pointed to the debt clock and said, we built that.

I am specifically concerned about the idea that the legislative process is one that gets characterized the way it is as the 'fiscal cliff.' At the end of the day, the United States is the biggest economy in the world, and the dollar is the reserve currency in the world. I think it behooves us to act in a much more responsible way.

I'm not going to raise taxes; I'm not going to have a wage increase for public employees.

I will veto any tax increase.

We have to deal with two issues. Spending and taxes.

The Beltway is waking up to the realities of Prsident Obam's budget plan, which taxes, spends, and borrows as far as the eye can see.

Increased revenues, meaning higher taxes, will be a central element of any successful long-term budget plan, and President Obama is right to insist that the wealthy - the slice of America that has come through the recession in by far the best financial health - should provide those funds.

Now, so, if you want to blame someone for wasteful spending, the Republicans are in the majority.

I think there is a shared sense of urgency in Washington on fiscal issues.

In the middle of a recession no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated.

One of the reasons we don't have our deficit under control is because Republicans are wusses and won't tell their base a simple fact that everyone knows. We can't eliminate the deficit without raising some revenue... They're wusses.

Even people on the liberal side are starting to worry about going off a fiscal cliff.

What you really want to do is sit down and find a place that you can control government spending and raise more revenue.

People question me all the time about my experience. They question my experience in politics, and the first thing I always tell them is yes, I have no experience raising taxes over and over. I have no experience increasing the debt in a state.