Quotes About Deficit

#1. I do think our challenge is to balance credibility and a clear message about how we would reduce the deficit with boldness about the choices that we put before the public.

Douglas Alexander

#2. Countries with deficit don't want to pay the bill, and they want to get more loans, and countries with superiority, they don't want to help the countries with problems, and they just want them to tighten their belts.

Sebastian Pinera

#3. Addiction might be redefined not as a character flaw but as a "biochemical deficit management." Our emotional habits will become an accepted factor of good health, along with slogans like "Heartache can be harmful to your unborn children."

Marni Jackson

#4. Which European leader today would not relish the wonder-working powers of a Moses? Budget deficit? Unpopular cuts? How about just a little miracle, an overnight increase in gold reserves, a new oil field, or the next world-changing communications technology? Surely that's not too much to ask.

Jonathan Sacks

#5. A lot of our fiscal deficit went to fund consumption and really did not get used to build investment and infrastructure. The trouble is, you can get a spurt in GDP growth, which may not be sustainable. I would much rather build the gradient of a long-term marathon.

Uday Kotak

#6. It's all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit.

Eartha Kitt

#7. Look, I don't dispute that the deficit has increased.

Austan Goolsbee

#8. If we proclaim a gospel that doesn't emphasize transformation, we end up with a deficit of clean containers, which consequently creates a shortage of God's manifest presence on the earth.

John Bevere

#9. The problem with our deficit is not because Americans are taxed too little. The problem with the deficit is because Washington spends too much money. We have got to stop spending money we don't have.

Paul Ryan

#10. The TUC's new slogan 'a future that works' sets a profound challenge. Austerity and rapid deficit reduction is failing in its own terms, but even at its best it is short-sighted, muddle-through politics with no vision of a new economic model.

Frances O'Grady

#11. Canada is in budgetary deficit now only because of the recession, only because of stimulus measures, and we will come out of it. We will go back into surplus position when the economy recovers. So there is no need in Canada to raise taxes.

Stephen Harper

#12. To finance this trade deficit, the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks, businesses, and real estate to the rest of the world.

Martin Feldstein

#13. The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight ...

Marian Wright Edelman

#14. In point of fact, 'Simpson-Bowles' has become a symbol, or SimBowl, rather than an actual plan, political shorthand for the process of long-term deficit reduction.

Joe Klein

#15. We had a $10 billion budget deficit when we got here in January of 2003. We cut that budget deficit; we did not raise taxes; we came back in '05, and we had an $8 billion surplus. That's how fast it can happen.

Rick Perry

#16. The biggest deficit in terms of gender equality at Ozon lay in our IT department. So we made a decision, along with our key IT leaders, to remove all filters and systemically interview all the women who apply.

Maelle Gavet

#17. The deficit is the symptom, but spending is the disease.

Jeb Hensarling

#18. Although economists have studied the sensitivity of import and export volumes to changes in the exchange rate, there is still much uncertainty about just how much the dollar must change to bring about any given reduction in our trade deficit.

Martin Feldstein

#19. I ask the American people not to fall victim to disinformation. There are no death panels. The Affordable Care Act cuts the deficit.

Al Franken

#20. Things are going better: there is more growth, less deficit, more competitiveness, better margins for companies, more purchasing power for workers.

Francois Hollande

#21. With a strong domestic economy, low national unemployment at 5 percent, and increasing retail sales, the picture should look rosy. But one look at the trade deficit changes all of that.

Jo Ann Emerson

#22. Men often think submission indicates weakness, that letting someone else take charge betrays a character deficit. But we all submit to strangers who drill into our teeth as long as we can see the parchment on their wall which reads Dentist.

Edmond Manning

#23. I do strongly believe myself that members of the government who sit in the House of Lords should be accountable to the elected House because otherwise there is a democratic deficit, and that is wrong.

John Bercow

#24. The U. S. trade deficit with China shows that while we value the potential of their market, they value the reality of our market. It is in this area that we should use our leverage.

Adam Schiff

#25. The sequestration is a bad idea, all around. It is something that is out of the question. If you have spending cuts, education of our children, other investments, on the National Institutes of Health, where you are hindering growth, you're no going to reduce the deficit.

Nancy Pelosi

#26. I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about.

P. J. O'Rourke

#27. We have to change economic policy: create confidence, foster investment, cut the public deficit, restructure taxation and reform the labor laws.

Mariano Rajoy

#28. Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

Christina Romer

#29. While there are no easy solutions to this problem, the Deficit Reduction Act gets us started in the right direction by beginning with the most obvious, commonsense reforms to save taxpayer dollars.

Jim Ryun

#30. I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don't remember a time when I didn't have them. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, my symptoms didn't have a name, and you didn't go to the doctor to find out.

Howie Mandel

#31. If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that's a good discussion. Maybe that's the way to help close the deficit.

Bill Gates

#32. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

John C. Danforth

#33. The United States has a huge budget deficit so taxes are going to have to go up and I certainly agree they should go up more on the rich than everyone else. That - that's just justice.

Bill Gates

#34. The only way that we can reduce our financial dependence on the inflow of funds from the rest of the world is to reduce our trade deficit.

Martin Feldstein

#35. We are on pace this year to have a trade deficit that is larger than $800 billion. We have never faced that before, but we continue to put forward trade agreements like these that leave us naked to competition that is neither free nor fair.

Xavier Becerra

#36. Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.

Ted Nelson

#37. We wanted to be certain they didn't have a bigger deficit, and Kennedy agreed with me.

Wilbur Mills

#38. The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.

Robert Reich

#39. The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.

Joseph Stiglitz

#40. Governing isn't as easy as you think. Many of you have taken pledges that are contradictory - to balance the budget and cut taxes, for example. You must be honest about the numbers, since our annual deficit now exceeds all discretionary spending combined.

Brian Baird

#41. American's greatest deficit is no longer found in the federal budget. It is a moral deficit, and it may be found in a polluted and poisoned culture that has become the great enemy within.

Pat Buchanan

#42. When George Bush came into office, we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually. When George Bush came into office, our national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it.

Barack Obama

#43. When the country's indebtedness is so colossal and where the budget deficit is so huge, there is a moral obligation on people to pay their fair and reasonable dues.

John Caudwell

#44. If you raise taxes, it won't reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources.

Grover Norquist

#45. I have attention deficit disorder, so sitting in a classroom is not the best thing for me.

Jeremy Miller

#46. The trade deficit is the capital surplus and don't ever think of having a capital surplus as being a bad thing for our country.

Arthur Laffer

#47. Spending on the military doesn't increase the deficit.

Ronald Reagan

#48. Only the insane equate pain with success."
"The uninformed must improve their deficit, or die."
_Cheshire Cat

Lewis Carroll

#49. It seems to me that instead of cutting taxes, we ought to be increasing the taxes to pay off the deficit, rather than let that thing build up to the point where our grandchildren's grandchildren are going to be paying for our period of time and our years at the helm.

Walter Cronkite

#50. A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence. Page 115

Sonia Sotomayor

#51. If you look at the studies coming out of the Congressional Budget Office, the number one thing that's going to blow a hole in the deficit as we go forward 20, 30 years is government spending on healthcare.

Christina Romer

#52. Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with.

Milton Friedman

#53. I have saved $1,638,580 over my four years. That may not seem like a lot, faced with our deficit, but multiply it by 435 members of the House - and then the senators get three times as much - and you are adding up several millions in savings.

Dan Webster

#54. What I'm saying is America has a job deficit because hundreds of thousands of jobs went elsewhere. Not because [Barack] Obama raised your taxes. He, in fact, lowered them. They are lower.

Henry Rollins

#55. One of the reasons the deficit got as big as it did, frankly, was because of the economic slowdown, the fall-off in deficits, the terrorist attacks. A significant chunk was taken out of the economy by what happened after the attacks of 9/11.

Dick Cheney

#56. I was a classic attention deficit disorder kid, always bored and mouthing off at school.

Stephen Rodrick

#57. Children from like 8 and even up to the college age - Spider-Man appeals to a fairly broad demographic but, like I said, a mean age probably of 12 is a good mark - they process information so quickly and it's not because of attention deficit or short attention span.

Thomas Haden Church

#58. 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.

Ed Rendell

#59. We have a serious structural deficit problem. And it needs to be addressed. The president is trying to address it through reforms of Social Security, but the problem is there with other entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

John W. Snow

#60. the United States will need substantially more revenues to close the budget deficit, especially recognizing the need to increase federal spending in certain critical areas. I

Jeffrey D. Sachs

#61. The challenge for any government is how do you do two things at the same time. How do you put money forward for things like the payroll tax holiday, for things like getting a jump-start on infrastructure, for building schools, and make the decisions for long-term deficit reduction.

Jacob Lew

#62. When the democratic deficit is so enormous, people are left with very little option but to take peaceful, non-violent direct action.

Caroline Lucas

#63. Well you know I'm very supportive of what the Tea Party is trying to do. They're very concerned with spending, the deficit, the bailouts, you know all of those kinds of things. But I really think that the strength of the Tea Party is being a grassroots movement.

John Boozman

#64. When Mr. Obama entered office, he said all the right things about getting Washington spending under control. He even promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Pete Hegseth

#65. Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.

Barack Obama

#66. Another air traffic controller fell asleep on the job, but he had a good excuse. He was watching President Obama's deficit speech.

Jay Leno

#67. As soon as the recovery is well under way, we need to set up a long-term plan to reduce the structural deficit and make sure we are not leaving a mountain of debt for the next generation.

Barack Obama

#68. I don't know how anyone can keep a straight face and say they are for deficit reduction while they insist on a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, completely unpaid for.

Claire McCaskill

#69. I have made mistakes - mighty big ones at that. Not the kind that would cause a national fiscal deficit a-la Manmohan Singh or ruin some unassuming person's life, but the kind that makes you go into face palm mode and want to die every time you are reminded of them.

Shuchi Singh Kalra

#70. Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.

Malcolm Turnbull

#71. I'm not a detail guy. I depend on accountants and administrators to do my detail stuff for me, but I do know the overall picture and I know that if you put business people together in a room, not just politicians, they could shrink the deficit tremendously by good business tactics.

John Paul DeJoria

#72. I am fighting for those middle-class families who want us to deal with our debt and deficit, but they also want the investments that are critical to our country moving forward.

Patty Murray

#73. The way my brain processes information is quite odd. I mean, I have Attention Deficit Disorder and another learning disability I can't even spell. I don't even have a high school diploma. I'm smart, but you can't prove it on paper.

Ron White

#74. The war on terrorism has made national security a legitimate concern, and a rising deficit, changes brought on by globalization and even the price of oil have thrown the nation's economic health into question.

Roger Mahony

#75. There's a joke in economics about the drunk who loses his keys in the street but only looks for them under the lightposts. When asked why, he says, 'because that's where the light is.' That's the problem with the deficit.

Christina Romer

#76. In special education, there's too much emphasis placed on the deficit and not enough on the strength.

Temple Grandin

#77. He downed the last of his coffee, carried his mug over to the pot, poured himself a refill, and returned to the table.
Why, yes, thank you, I'd love some more coffee. Hmmm, Narcisstic Personality Disorder? Attention Deficit Disorder? Or just a typical male?

Lynda Hilburn

#78. Given that a significant percentage of children suffer from attention deficit problems in today's world, especially in more materially affluent societies, I am told that substantial efforts are being made to understand the faculty of attention and its causal dynamics.

Dalai Lama XIV

#79. Thanks to former President George W. Bush - remember the compassionate conservative? - I have a good name for the fundamental principle that should guide the Democratic alternative: compassionate deficit reduction.

Christina Romer

#80. Is this money well spent? This is taxpayer money, it is going to be adding to the deficit short term and if we can't justify it, then we're not going to spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, just to make somebody happy, if it's not good for the economy.

Barack Obama

#81. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

Alan Greenspan

#82. It's critical to show that we can meet our commitment to students with disabilities without raising taxes and without increasing the deficit. In the past, there's been strong support for full funding and I'm still hearing that from many of my colleagues.

Jared Polis

#83. Well obviously the economy is critical to everything we do and we need to get the economy back in shape, the deficit down, the debt paid off, so that the economy can grow again and grow properly.

Iain Duncan Smith

#84. This Constitution does not reflect the thoughts, hopes and aspirations of ordinary people. It does nothing for jobs or economic growth and widens further still the democratic deficit.

Nigel Farage

#85. Well, a deficit reflects an imbalance between spending and revenue, and so narrowing it requires acting on one, the other or both.

Peter Orszag

#86. The truth of the matter is that countries the world over have deficits. Let us remember this about Scotland's deficit: it was not created in an independent Scotland; it was created on Westminster's watch.

Nicola Sturgeon

#87. It is vital that we get these policies right as we take forward our plans to drive down the deficit and transform our economy.

David Cameron

#88. To be fair, Republicans are not blameless. The deficit began to spiral out of control on President Bush's watch.

Rob Woodall

#89. Clinical training in psychoanalysis has a deficit. It teaches how to sit and think about what a person is saying and how to interpret it intellectually, but not how to be fully present to this person.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#90. The national deficit is not rising.

Ed Balls

#91. My doctor told me i had Attention Deficit Disorder. He said, 'ADD is a complex disorder, blah, blah, blah,' I didn't pay attention to the rest.

Kyle Dunnigan

#92. The American people want a balanced budget. They want Congress to stop this barbaric practice of perpetual deficit spending. It really, if you think about it, is a form of taxation without representation. We fought a war over that issue and we won that war.

Mike Lee

#93. What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#94. The Affordable Care Act reduces the deficit considerably. I would simply point out to you that the Supreme Court has spoken, the American people have spoken, congressional leaders of both parties have spoken, and we're going to continue with implementation.

Jay Carney

#95. Unlike the federal government, most states don't have the option of running a deficit.

Marcia Angell

#96. There is a nationwide shortage of drugs for Attention Deficit Disorder. The FDA says they're not sure how it happened. I guess somebody wasn't paying attention.

Jay Leno

#97. If you lose control of your debt and deficit, you get massive cuts in things such as health and education. You get appalling insecurity, jobs lost, firms going overseas.

David Cameron

#98. If a trade deficit is determined solely by rates of savings and investment, then the U.S. trade deficit will be impervious to a get-tough trade policy. Slapping higher tariffs on imports will only deprive foreigners of the dollars they would have earned by selling in the U.S. market.

Daniel T. Griswold

#99. In the past, proactive fiscal polices almost always meant just more investment and an increase in the fiscal deficit.

Li Keqiang

#100. Reconciliation is a special budget procedure to change entitlement and tax laws. It cannot be filibustered and requires only a simple majority in the Senate to be passed. It is primarily intended for deficit and mandatory spending reduction.

Jeff Miller