A Quote by Dick Gephardt
The deficit only became a big problem in the Reagan-Bush years. For 12 years, Republican presidents talked about balancing the budget, but failed to propose one.
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The truth is that for a Democrat to triumph in a presidential election, it needs to come on the heels of 'the dark times' of an unpopular Republican administration. Carter followed the Nixon era, Clinton succeeded after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and Obama was a direct result of eight years of Bush/Cheney.
I changed to Republican when Reagan became president because I wanted to see a change to years of Democrat-run Senate. And I voted Republican until Obama. I think he's terrific.
Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents - Nixon, Ike, and Reagan - you see them failing on this score.
Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.
We've not had one Republican president in 34 years balance the budget. You can't trust right-wing Republicans with your money. You ought to hire somebody who has balanced a budget. I'm much more conservative with money than George Bush is.
He [Barack Obama] talked about deficit reduction. This got me he was talking about how the deficit's being reduced faster in the last 60 years. That's because he's collected more taxes. That's like bragging that you paid your rent after you robbed a bank. It makes no sense.
When Mike Hammond and I started Gateway 12 years ago on my father's cattle farm, we knew it could be big. We talked big. But there's no way we could have been prepared to go from less than $300 million in revenues to $5 billion in six years. You can't so much prepare for that kind of growth as sort of ride it and try to manage it.
If you think about it, candidate Obama, Sen. Obama, was running on sort of long-run economic issues, like restoring prosperity to the middle class, dealing with the perennial problem of health care in the United States. He talked a lot about the budget deficit, about the need to transition to clean energy.
Not in the constitution, but I would propose a law to the French parliament that provides for reducing the budget deficit year by year, until we have reached a balanced budget by 2017.
I don't understand how the Republican party is the party with the reputation for fiscal conservatism and fiscal sanity, when they're the ones who run up the debt. It was Reagan who ran up the debt and now Bush is doing it again, and in between, Clinton and Bush's father, I must say, worked so hard to get that deficit and that debt down.
After the Reagan years, there were only three people of color in the Republican Party. Their slogan was 'Republicans - the Other White Meat.' George [H.] Bush tried to dispel the 'whites only' image of his party, often referring to his Mexican-American grandkids as 'the little brown ones over there,' and nominated Clarence Uncle Thomas to the Supreme Court.
I think I see a tremendous amount of waste. I see a tremendous amount of job opportunities that have been let go for many years, and I'm not just talking about President Obama. I'm talking about for many, many years. And I was a big, big fan of Ronald Reagan, but I was a never big fan on trade with respect to Ronald Reagan.
The zeitgeist is for cutting spending and balancing the budget. But I do not want the Republican Party to be perceived as putting the budget ahead of people, jobs and education.
As a Republican, I have listened to Democrats talk about the only two times we won the White House in like 200 years that we stole both elections. I had to sit through Fahrenheit 9/11 and a lady was sobbing violently behind me about the election being stolen by George Bush and I patted her half way through and said, 'it's alright, it's alright. It's all a lie anyway.' Democrats have been whining for 16 years, they're still writing articles about how Bush stole the election in 2004 and 2000.
Both candidates for president talk about balancing the budget ten years from now. Even if they win, they won't be in office then.
The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing.
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