Jim Cooper Quotes

Congress as a whole is less popular than it's been since polling was invented.

Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have criticized Bush for his big increases in spending, which far exceed those of the Clinton era.

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.

This Congress is simply not doing its job under Republican leadership.

Any politician who's ever been re-elected knows that friends come and go; enemies accumulate.

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.

Our nation suffers when Congress fails to pay America's bills on time.

In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.

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.

Under the AHP approach, the average small business might be able to offer their employees one or two insurance plans, and that employee of the small business would have no idea whether their doctor was going to be a apart of one of those plans.

Well, where is the money? Show me the money? Our allies have put up a few billion dollars, but the American taxpayer has been required to shoulder the burden of this war.

I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

I would rather avoid disaster than take it out for dinner and a movie. - Chynna Lennox

If taxpayers want better results from Congress, they must stop paying their elected officials for failure. After all, you get what you pay for.

While tax refunds amount to substantial income for many Americans, current IRS rules do not allow taxpayers to directly deposit their refund into more than one account.

Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow.

Take the veto. Bush is the first president since James Garfield in 1881 not to veto a single bill. Garfield only had six months in office; Bush has had over four years.

With our national savings rate well below one-percent, it is imperative that the government embrace innovative and cost-effective means of boosting personal savings.

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.

Immortality awaits the legislator fortunate enough to have a significant law named after him. Think of Pell grants or Stafford loans for students, Sarbanes-Oxley to regulate Wall Street, or the Hyde Amendment on abortions.

If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.

Politicians are terrified of losing touch with folks back home but content to be clueless about government's failure to fix real problems.

It's not just that families can't buy a home or start a business without some savings tucked away.

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.