Fiscal Responsibility - March 17, 2009

Good morning. I'm Shelley Moore Capito. I represent the second district of West Virginia, and I'm pleased to be here this morning. I'm just returning from a week of being home and realizing that West Virginians and the American people, they get it. They get overspending. They get generational debt. They get the fact that that we know that there are issues out there that they're struggling with. Losing jobs, having difficulty making those day-to-day obligations in their families…. So we have joined together to ask the president to allow us to help find the solutions to these very difficult problems. We welcome the president's address tonight. I look forward to seeing how he is going to address these very difficult issues in our nation. But we have, over the last five months, spent a tremendous amount of money and set aside hundreds of billions more, and we're going to hear more and more about that as we move through the next several months and years. This is generational debt at the feet of our children and our grandchildren. I had a very interesting encounter at the grocery store when I was home. The bag boy was there. I'm certain he was making minimum wage or maybe slightly more, but he was a young man trying to really do the right thing. He sort of looked at me, and he said "thank you" for voting no on the stimulus bill. Well, I was kind of surprised that he was that clued in. I thought, well that's great that he recognized me and that I made my vote and what my vote was, and I asked him further, I said, "Why? Why do you think that was a good vote for you?" And he said, "I don't want my taxpayers' dollars and I don't want my tax dollars paying for all that other stuff." And so when I say the American people get it, he gets it. And I think that that's what we are all about today. It's about restoring confidence. It's about getting fiscal discipline back to Washington, and it's about realizing that the American people and West Virginians understand that there's only so much money at the end of the day that we have to spend, and we have to prioritize and use that money wisely. Thank you.

Speech from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9K41RUiaUI&list=UUftKT5ENIKjqidj9Xz6b_Yw.*