From his final floor speech on it yesterday:
This is one of the most expensive pieces of legislation Congress has ever approved. Including interest, as I’ve said, it’s expected to cost $1.1 trillion. To put that figure in perspective, consider this: if you spent $1 million a day, every day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion. This is an extraordinary sum of money. It deserves an extraordinary level of scrutiny.
Yet even based on the ordinary standards of evaluation, it easily fails the test. And even if the bill were timely, targeted, and temporary, we’d still have to look at the price tag in the context of all the other spending we’ll soon be asked to consider. The American people need to remember that this stimulus is just one piece of the Democrats’ overall spending plan.
Soon we’ll be asked to consider $50 billion for housing, and unspecified hundreds of billions — possibly even another trillion dollars — for troubled banks. We’ll also soon be voting on a $400 billion Omnibus Appropriations bill that will bring the total discretionary spending for the fiscal year to more than $1 trillion for the first time ever.
This isn’t Monopoly money. It’s real. It adds up — and it has to be paid back, by our children and by their children.