Top 571 Deficit Quotes & Sayings - Page 9

When I became mayor of New York City, I had a $2.4 billion deficit. And everybody wanted me to raise taxes. I said, 'If I raise taxes, I'll drive people out of New York City, and then I'll be raising taxes again.' So what I did was I cut expenses by 15 percent.

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?

In addition to myself and a number of others, President Clinton talked about the deficit and the debt issue. And he pointed out, really, what I pointed out, which is that when he left office, we actually had projected surpluses for a long period of time, because when he put together his economic plan, he did it in a balanced way.

We certainly could have voted on making the middle-class tax cuts and tax cuts for working families permanent had the Republicans not insisted that the only way they would support those tax breaks is if we also added $700 billion to the deficit to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. That's what was really disturbing.

A friend gave me a drug for attention deficit disorder, because he's afflicted, but I'm not. So what happened to me is I suddenly had an extra-long attention span. People would tell me a story, and it would end, and I'd get all mad. "Come on, man, there has to be more to that story."

Arnold was on the 'Today' show today, he was a little light on specifics. He said he could solve California's $38 billion budget deficit, without cutting spending or raising taxes because there was a third way. What is it? Let's just say it involves a robot going back in time to convince Gray Davis to go into dentistry.

I'm finding myself really angry over spending and the deficit. I'm finding myself really angry over what's happening in the Middle East, the decision to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. I'm angry about cap and trade. And I've been on record for a long time on the failed war on drugs.

Our folks have a lot of passion. They're very concerned about the direction of the country and concerned the record debt and deficit and what it means for their kids, concerned about the economy and the fact that we're not getting back on track with the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. And at the end of the day, I think that's going to make the difference.

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.

Only dramatic cuts in the federal deficit, a rollback of regulations that cripple small and community banks, a cancellation of future tax increase plans, a big reduction in federal spending, repeal of Obamacare, freeing manufacturing from the prospect of carbon taxation and unleashing out domestic energy potential can solve our problems. But Obama is not about to undo his legacy of disaster for the American people.

I didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.

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.

The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch - Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference - that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.

Given [Donald] Trump`s polling deficit, his reluctance for ads until very recently in his near total lack of any ground game to speak off, it came as a surprise today that according to The Washington Post, Trump has stopped holding high-dollar fund-raising events, relying almost exclusively on online donations, which, of course, tend to be much smaller.

The folks celebrating Jim Bunning are seeing him as an anti-government, anti-spending activist. But to embrace Jim Bunning is to embrace a strange record, if you really are a libertarian, if you really are a deficit hawk, if you really care about spending and responsibility.

I want people to understand that, look, we're in a period of democratic deficit, democratic recession. There are fewer democracies in the world today than in 2005, and in many of the countries that are still technically democracies, we're seeing a reduction in the rule of law. And that's especially true in Central Europe, but it's also true of places like South Africa, the Philippines.

If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit.

Budget cuts if you're not rich, tax cuts if you are. Less money for those who don't have any and more to those who do. That's how President Fredo says we're going to get out of the giant deficit hole he's dug. You can't put it any more simply. Rich people richer. Poor people poorer.

A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland's youth) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what's left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs.

Is keeping Big Oil happy with subsidies from the American people more important than addressing our deficit? Should a billionaire who makes a multi-million-dollar gift to a museum receive more tax bang for his charitable buck than a middle-class family who gives to their local church?

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don't pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt; the United States continues to spend more on its military than do all other nations on earth put together, and military expenditures are not only the basis of the government's industrial policy; they also take up such a huge proportion of the budget that by many estimations, were it not for them, the United States would not run a deficit at all.

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.

I would like to believe that TPP will lead to more exports and jobs for the American people. But history shows that big trade agreements - from NAFTA to the Korea Free Trade Agreement - have resulted in fewer American jobs, lower wages, and a bigger trade deficit.

It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. "Everything went white," those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.

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.

Whenever the debate moves on to hard numbers - our deficit with Europe, our surplus with the rest of the world, our Brussels budget contributions, the tiny part of our economy dependent on sales to the EU, the vast part subjected to EU regulation - Euro-enthusiasts quickly shift their ground and start harrumphing about influence.

Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.

We need to have the growth. If we simply look at this as being deficit-neutral, you're never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to get to sustain 3 percent economic growth. We really do believe that the tax code is what's holding back the American economy.

If we take two people who have exactly the same sort of lesion or area of damage in the brain and then we do cognitive tests on them, you know, one person might have a very severe deficit in a certain area of thinking and another person might not with the same exact lesion. So there is a lot of differences and you can't just look at one brain and understand the whole picture.

If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.

I battle with things like depression in my life, I battle with things like anxiety, I battle with things like attention deficit disorder, and I ignored them all.

What we also have to recognize is that the deficit levels that I'm inheriting, over a trillion dollars, coming out of last year, that that is unsustainable. At a certain point, other countries stop buying our debt, at a certain point, we'd end up having to raise interest rates, and it would end up creating more economic chaos and potentially inflation.

In the budget, the president will call for a five-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for national security. This will reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade and bring this category of spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.

This nation is on a course where if we don't do something about it, get federal situation, the fiscal policy [under control], we're Greece. We're a banana republic. Our status as a nation is threatened by what we’ve got coming at us in the area of deficit and debt. And it’s only a few more years, at the most, that we have to work with here before the market says, ‘Sorry, your currency is something we can not continue to defend.’

Several elements of the ADD mind favor creativity....As mentioned earlier, the term 'attention deficit' is a misnomer. It is a matter of attention inconsistency. While it is true that the ADD mind wanders when not engaged, it is also the case that the ADD mind fastens on to its subject fiercely when it is engaged. A child with ADD may sit for hours meticulously putting together a model airplane.

You can't be perceived as 'the black actress who doesn't get the same kind of roles as the white actress.' You gotta run the same race. You gotta give the same quality of performances. You gotta have the same standard of excellence, even though people know that you're coming to the race in a deficit. That's just what life is about.

That's the kind of thinking that our country needs. When we have a country that's doing so badly, that's being ripped off by every single country in the world, it's the kind of thinking that our country needs, because everybody, we have a trade deficit with all of the countries that we do business with, of almost $800 billion a year.

We have to get the tax revenues up. That means we have to get back to a healthy American economy, grow the economy so that you make more money. I make more money, ordinary Americans make more money, and so does the government. That helps lessen the deficit.

Cold-turkey deficit reduction would cause a significant recession. A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that going headlong over the cliff would cause our gross domestic product, which has been growing at an annual rate of around 2 percent, to fall at a rate of 2.9 percent in the first half of 2013.

I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion-dollar deficit. ... This notion that somehow we caused the deficits is just wrong. It's just not true. ... If they start trying to give you a bunch of facts and figures suggesting that it's true, what they're not telling you is they baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts and a prescription drug plan that they didn't pay for and the wars.

And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it.

During the 1999 debate over Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China President Bill Clinton said, 'In opening the economy of China, the agreement will create unprecedented opportunities for American farmers, workers and companies to compete successfully in China's market. WRONG: Our trade deficit with China has increased from $83 billion in 2001 to a record breaking $342 billion in 2014.

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

China are running trade deficits with the rest of the world. If you look at the U.S. trade deficit, it's close to $800 billion trade in goods. Half of that is with China, so it's a big part of the problem. And the problem with China, as opposed to, say, Canada, is that China cheats.

If there's a severe recession, the automatic stabilizers will come into effect, and we will still try to reduce the structural deficit, but we will not try to keep cutting the budget so that we keep worsening a severe recession.

Our platform calls for a balanced deficit reduction plan where the wealthy pay their fair share. And when your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare - it's patriotism.

That's what the Romney plan is all about, how to get jobs created, how to get this debt and deficit under control, how to revive small businesses so we can create jobs, and how to bring growth and opportunity to society instead of this class warfare, instead of speaking to people like they're stuck in some class or station in life.

The far more likely Trump scenario is this: Chinese leaders realize they no longer have a weak leader in the White House; China ceases its unfair trade practices. America's massive trade deficit with China comes peacefully and prosperously back into balance, and both the U.S. and Chinese economies benefit from trade.

It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

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.

Obama seemed poised to realign American politics after his stunning 2008 victory. But the economy remains worse than even the administration's worst-case scenarios, and the long legislative battles over health care reform, financial services reform and the national debt and deficit have taken their toll. Obama no longer looks invincible.

Let me tell you the story about Massachusetts under Governor Romney. It did fall to 47th out of 50 in jobs creation. Wages went down when they were going up in the rest of the country. He left his successor with debt and a deficit, and manufacturing jobs left that state at twice the rate as the rest of the country.

When it comes to the budget, we know that we shouldn't be cutting more on core investments, like education, that are going to help us grow in the future. And we've already seen the deficit cut in half. It's going down faster than any time in the last 60 years. So why would we make more cuts in education, more cuts in basic research? Nobody thinks that's a good idea.

We're going to fix [trade deals].You know, last year [2015] we lost almost $800 billion in trade deficits. We have trade deficit with other nations of almost $800 billion.

Democrats cannot win elections without capturing the votes of independent-minded swing voters. And that is where writing off the Tea Party as a bunch of racist kooks becomes self-destructive. The Tea Party outrage over health-care reform, deficit spending and entitlements run amok is no fringe concern.

Our first benchmark is to cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain’s credit rating. I know that we are taking a political gamble to set this up as a measure of success. Protecting the credit rating will not be easy The pace of fiscal consolidation will be co-ordinated with monetary policy. And we will protect Britain's credit rating and international reputation.

We're going to need to absorb some pain. The Republicans want to pile all the pain on people who can least afford it and the middle class and Democrats under his leadership want to make sure that we can address deficit reduction and continue to make investments and shared sacrifice is going to be imperative in order to be able to do that.

Budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders, but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions. And any new recession would break all deficit records. In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.