A Quote by Joseph Stiglitz
The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.
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We can have tax cuts, but when we have tax cuts and do not have a surplus, the amount of the tax cut goes straight to the bottom line, adds to the deficit, and the deficit adds to the national debt, and sooner or later, the debt has to be paid.
It is my view that what is important is cutting government spending, however spending is financed. A so-called deficit is a disguised and hidden form of taxation. The real burden on the public is what government spends (and mandates others to spend). As I have said repeatedly, I would rather have government spend one trillion dollars with a deficit of a half a trillion than have government spend two trillion dollars with no deficit.
The amount of money coming into Washington is not a factor when the Democrats start spending it. Witness Obama. National debt doubled in eight years. It didn't matter what the tax revenue was. Didn't matter. He was gonna spend the money anyway.
To reduce deficit spending and our enormous debt, you reign in spending. You cut the budget. You don't take more from the private sector and grow government with it. And that's exactly what Obama has in mind with this expiration of Bush tax cuts proposal of his.
The U.S. has a law on the books called the debt limit, but the name is misleading. The debt limit started in 1917 for the purpose of facilitating more national debt, not reducing it. It still serves that purpose. It's unconnected to spending, hurts our credit rating and has been an abject failure at limiting debt.
When you look at February's (2011) deficit spending alone, and the fact that it was larger than what our total deficit spending was in 2007, the proposals that the Senate is sending us simply are ridiculous, because it's not even a solution. It doesn't address the amount of spending that we have in a week's time. We need to get serious.
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.
It took the national debt two hundred years to reach $1 trillion. Supply Side Economics quadrupled the national debt to over $4 trillion in twelve years (1980-1992) under the Republicans. Bill Clinton actually paid down the national debt. How did he do it? He raised taxes. It produced the longest sustained economic expansion in U.S. History.
We've got to start worrying about America. And if we don't start dealing with the debt we have and the deficit spending we have in Washington, politics doesn't matter, because the American people do realize that they have to balance their budgets.
The only way to reduce our national debt is to grow the economy and cut spending. We have no idea how our money is being spent. As president, I will move all agencies to zero-based budgeting so that every agency has to justify every dollar that they spend.
President Bush, yes, spent money like a drunken sailor, and left the nation with a record $400-billion deficit. President Obama, however, is spending far more money than Bush, with a record $1.8 trillion deficit projected for his first year.
What's hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can't even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic - it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.
When my husband was president, we went from a $300 billion deficit to a $200 billion surplus and we were actually on the path to eliminating the national debt. When President Obama came into office, he inherited the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. He has cut the deficit by two-thirds.
How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program - and not explode the deficit and national debt?
There is a lot of fiscal conservatives in the United States senate that didn't vote for that because we understand that national security spending is not the reason why we have a debt. Our debt is being driven by the way Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and, by the way, the interest on the debt is structured in the years to come.
There's also consumer debt, the credit card debt that burdens many of the working families in America. Yes, we talk about national debt, and we're paying a lot down. But you're fixing to hear me tell you part of the remedy for people who have got a lot of credit card debt is to make sure people get some of their own money back.
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