Quotes About Deficits

#1. If you're really concerned about deficits, you cannot take seriously a budget that would give $30 billion a year worth of tax cuts to not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent.

Barack Obama

#2. New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.

Henry Hazlitt

#3. For almost 50 years polls have shown that a large majority of the public believe that the budget should be balanced, and for all that time they have elected office seekers who would not balance it. The public cares about deficits, but doesn't care much.

Herbert Stein

#4. These days the technology can solve our problems and then some. Solutions may not only erase physical or mental deficits but leave patients better off than 'able-bodied' folks. The person who has a disability today may have a superability tomorrow.

Daniel H. Wilson

#5. If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do - it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind's normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficits.

Deborah Blum

#6. Chronic deficits drastically reduce government's ability to make those infrastructure investments that business needs to grow and create jobs.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#7. I have spoken about deficits, and I think deficits are important because they address broad economic and financial stability. We need to talk about that.

Ben Bernanke

#8. Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.

Oliver Sacks

#9. Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#10. Indeed, as subsequent events would show, debts, rather than deficits, make countries vulnerable in a monetary union.

Jean Pisani-Ferry

#11. President Obama met with leaders of the American Indian tribes and they honored the president by giving him his own Indian name: Running Deficits.

Jay Leno

#12. The weed that wasn't Editorial Board | 488 words THE NEWS is full of instances in which deficits in common sense produce bad outcomes. But rarely is the deficit so clear, or the outcome so wretched, as in the case of a sixth-grade boy in Bedford County,

Anonymous

#13. When I work with countries struggling to pay for budgets or finance trade deficits, I reflect on how Americans do not spend a moment considering the unique advantages of being able to issue bonds and print money freely.

Robert Zoellick

#14. It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

John F. Kerry

#15. Conservatives were brought up to hate deficits and justifiably so. We've long thought there are two things in Washington that are unbalanced - the budget and the liberals.

Ronald Reagan

#16. We don't need more politicians insisting we have deficits because you're not taxed enough. Those deficits ballooned from an economy that didn't grow enough and from 50 years of government spending too much.

Ronald Reagan

#17. A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions, lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-money issues, which lead to higher prices.

Henry Hazlitt

#18. Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.

Jonathan Kozol

#19. President Obama's policies have been categorical failures for our country. Unemployment is over nine percent, our deficits are growing, and small businesses are being burdened with regulations.

Timothy Griffin

#20. Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.

Robert C. Solomon

#21. The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

Matt Taibbi

#22. Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.

Ron Paul

#23. That the policies - from energy to labor policies, trade policies, government policies relating to debt and deficits are all aligning in such a way that America, far from being one of the places people are running from, is a place people are going to come to and add jobs.

Mitt Romney

#24. It seems to me there are good deficits and bad deficits. Now, we have a deficit that comes from the militarization of our society and our policy and our approach to the global arena.

Victor Saul Navasky

#25. Traditionally, the way deficits have been cut is you hold expenditures more or less constant in real dollars and then let growth come in to fill it up.

Phil Bredesen

#26. While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.

John Mackey

#27. Our fiat currency is under increasing stress with our large and growing trade deficits. We have a federal deficit that is calculated in the trillions when we take into account the net present value of the future Social Security and Medicaid obligations we are creating today.

George Noory

#28. Through the practice of yoga, you come to feel confident and develop a feeling of wholeness and completeness; you are not likely to feel deprived or 'less than.' People steal because they feel deprived. They try to make up for their deficits by depriving others.

Sharon Gannon

#29. We're focused on doing the things that make the economy perform well, and as you do that, reduce deficits, for one, very important; secondly, keep growth rates high, very important.

John W. Snow

#30. Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street.

John Sununu

#31. Californians are worried about whether they will have a job along with ballooning federal spending and deficits.

Carly Fiorina

#32. Yes, it is long past time we get serious about tackling the nation's ever-growing deficits. But the average American family drawn into serious debt cannot just threaten to stiff its creditors. It must cut its spending in the future, but also take responsibility for the debt incurred in the past.

Peter Welch

#33. To finance deficits, the government must sell bonds to investors, competing for capital that could otherwise be used to invest in stocks or corporate bonds. Government borrowings raise long-term interest rates, stifling economic growth.

Alex Berenson

#34. Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch.

Eugene Jarecki

#35. I don't know how you make a record on liberal and conservative these days. We've had a conservative Republican Congress, so to speak, and a conservative president, and we've run up one of the most astounding deficits in the history of our nation.

Sam Nunn

#36. It is day after day in this institution, borrow money, run up the debt, run up the deficits and then with a straight face say, we are going to repeal a tax that affects 1 percent of the American people, just 1 percent of the American people.

Richard Neal

#37. Deficits must be cut, yes, but the rush to austerity risks undermining the fragile global recovery.

Alistair Darling

#38. What is perceived as normal. That makes it other people's failings. Deficits. Not yours. Who the hell sets the standards, huh? Who gets to say how we are supposed to be? Or who we are supposed to be? And how dare anyone make you feel inadequate for being who you are? It's not okay. It pisses me off.

Jessica Park

#39. I've, we have in this state, like many other states, we're experiencing an enormous budget deficit that we're trying to grapple with. But we will have progress despite the deficits.

Jennifer Granholm

#40. I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

Alan Greenspan

#41. I served at a time when we had a strong economy, when we had deficits that we would die for today. I was able to propose a balanced budget, not over ten years, but over five years. I'm proud of that record.

Rob Portman

#42. I want to be very clear: I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.

Barack Obama

#43. The main premise of appreciative inquiry is that positive questions, focusing on strengths and assets, tend to yield more effective results than negative questions focusing on problems or deficits.

Warren Berger

#44. It is past time for Republican leadership to answer for record deficits and reckless spending, both in Iraq and in the U.S. It's time for a plan to bring our troops home.

Sherrod Brown

#45. Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.

Gary Johnson

#46. Here, too, we tend to be schizophrenic. We would all like to see government spending go down, provided it is not spending that benefits us. We would all like to see deficits reduced, provided it is through taxes imposed on others.

Milton Friedman

#47. Bush may be a strong leader in the war on terrorism, but on budget deficits he is missing-in-action.

Jim Cooper

#48. I know economists will say well, we could run a small deficit but the problem is that once you cross that line as we see in the United States, nothing stops deficits from getting larger and larger and spiralling out of control.

Stephen Harper

#49. When [Republicans] say they can reduce taxes and trim deficits at the same time, they are either deluded or deceptive, and they are playing voters for fools.

E. J. Dionne

#50. If you want more from life - start by counting your blessings instead of counting your losses, deficits and wants.

Bryant McGill

#51. We can't just cut our way to prosperity. Even as we look for ways to reduce deficits over the long term, we must grow the economy in a way that strengthens the middle class and everyone willing to work hard to get into it.

Jennifer Palmieri

#52. We have to reduce the burden placed on our economy by years of deficits and debt.

Jacob Lew

#53. Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

William Vickrey

#54. Reagan proved deficits don't matter.

Dick Cheney

#55. There are several silver linings on the horizon. The current account deficits in Spain and Portugal are declining because they have become more competitive and they're exporting more.

Wolfgang Schauble

#56. Brain tumor survivors,don't become hopelessly discouraged if you are experiencing deficits. You are in a war and you are bound to have a few battle wounds.

Rachel Grady

#57. The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits.

Dick Wolf

#58. You can't blame the administration and the Republicans for taking us back to deficits, for spending the Social Security surplus and assaulting the environment. That's what they promised to do in the last election.

William J. Clinton

#59. Yes, deficits are a problem. I've been saying so for more than a quarter of a century now. But the problem is not the size of the deficit, it's the size of government's claim on our economy.

Ronald Reagan

#60. A lot of people say, 'Why do health-care reform when the deficits are so big?' But that is when we've got to do it.

Mike Ross

#61. When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.

Thomas Frank

#62. Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#63. Deficits. Most people of knowledge say it's the biggest single problem facing the economic free world.

David Hartman

#64. We developed during the 1990s a series of budget process rules that helped us bring to heel these deficits, diminishing every year and moving the budget so into surplus.

John Spratt

#65. For one thing, one of the wonderful things that we now have is instead of the huge budget surpluses that President Clinton left us with, we now have these huge deficits that we're going to be facing into the future.

Geraldine Ferraro

#66. On the issues that I care deeply about - the environment, Roe vs. Wade, the war in Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction, the tax cuts that are now leading to deficits, I've got some deep issues with the president.

Lincoln Chafee

#67. Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.

Nouriel Roubini

#68. We must create wealth and we must cut our deficits.

Manuel Valls

#69. What works for Germany can't work for the rest of Europe: No country can run a chronic surplus without others running deficits.

George Soros

#70. Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as 'deficits as far as the eye can see.' But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?

Karl Rove

#71. We've been the foolish country for so long with this free trade, but it's not free trade because it's - you know, just doesn't work. I mean, it's not working. You look at the deficits we have.

Donald Trump

#72. In a time of serious budget deficits, immense war costs and a sluggish economy, we cannot afford to grant such outlandish subsidies to some of our Nation's largest corporations.

Ron Kind

#73. Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.

Jonah Goldberg

#74. Tax increases don't eliminate deficits they increase govt. spending.

Ronald Reagan

#75. Republicans profess to be against deficits, but they are experts at creating and exacerbating deficits.

Keith Ellison

#76. I have three adult children, and I have four grandchildren. I want to stop the deficits. I want to make sure that we're not passing on to my children and my grandchildren deficits and that we cannot repay and that they will have to repay and maybe they won't be able to repay them.

Doug Hoffman

#77. It's disappointing that President Obama - who ran for office in 2008 saying he was going to be a fiscally responsible president - has caused the largest deficits and the largest debt in American history.

Raul Labrador

#78. But if they want to really think about the fiscal future of this country, then think about how we have moved from hundreds of billions of surpluses to hundreds of billions of deficits.

Chaka Fattah

#79. Unfortunately the Republican tax cut will deny important revenues to many states facing their own deficits. This will create greater pressure for higher state and local taxes.

Dick Durbin

#80. Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

Richard Lamm

#81. If a government resorts to inflation, that is, creates money in order to cover its budget deficits or expands credit in order to stimulate business, then no power on earth, no gimmick, device, trick or even indexation can prevent its economic consequences.

Henry Hazlitt

#82. Compared to developed countries, or even to some major emerging countries, burdened by aging populations, financial crises, widening budget deficits, faltering faith in politics and growing social demands, Africa has become the world's last 'New Frontier:' a kind of 'it-continent.'

Mo Ibrahim

#83. When there's downward pressure on growth, one choice is to adjust economic policy, increase deficits, relax monetary policy. That might have a short-term benefit, but may not be beneficial for the future.

Li Keqiang

#84. Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

Peter Orszag

#85. Looking at the high cost of occupation in Iraq and the needs we have in this country, would it not have been better to have smaller tax cuts in order to keep down the deficits.

Tim Russert

#86. Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt.

Murray Rothbard

#87. I'm a fiscal hawk. I vote against all taxes, but I do believe the environment, and climate change, is a bigger issue than fiscal deficits are as a risk to the nation.

Vinod Khosla

#88. Today, we have a trade regime which has led to the largest trade deficits this country has ever experienced.

Xavier Becerra

#89. I think that's what activates the Tea Party Movement. What they see is the government interfering with their lives and with the inheritance of their children. Are we going to pass down liberty or deficits? And that's really what this movement is about.

Sharron Angle

#90. We may casually talk of all sorts of new programs and 'stimulus,' but the vast trillion-dollar collective national debt and rising annual deficits will insidiously hamstring almost everything we plan to do.

Victor Davis Hanson

#91. The social and racial conflict, which springs from the redistribution ideology, may deepen as economic output is shrinking and transfer 'entitlements cause budget deficits to soar. The U.S. dollar, which has become a mere corollary of government finance, is likely to survive the soaring deficits.

Hans F. Sennholz

#92. The tea party movement and its passion arose in response to trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and out of a sense that Washington is in need of dire fiscal reform.

Ari Fleischer

#93. Near-term deficits are temporary and manageable if - and only if - we keep spending in check, the tax burden low and the economy growing.

Jim Nussle

#94. There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries.

Robert C. Solomon

#95. Governments don't reduce deficits by raising taxes on the people; governments reduce deficits by controlling spending and stimulating new wealth.

Ronald Reagan

#96. To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

Ben Bernanke

#97. Electrical fire and the fire of greed kindle economies. In that flux, nations become digitized commodities on stock-exchange floors and on investors' rating screens. A country becomes a product to be rated for its obedience to paying of deficits and debts.

B.W. Powe

#98. 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

#99. Of course, there's been a real debate about where to invest and where to cut, and I'm committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt. But we can't simply cut our way to prosperity.

Barack Obama

#100. I've got a chart here that shows our debt-to-GDP ratio. And while we did run deficits in the past, we now number our debt in trillions rather than in billions. And I think that represents a long-term danger, especially to the, the American dream.

Mark Kirk