Budget Deficit Quotes

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

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. ~ Christina Romer

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

I said we are going to balance an $11 billion budget deficit in a $29 billion budget, so by percentage, the largest budget deficit in America, by percentage, larger than California, larger than New York, larger than Illinois. And we're going to balance that without raising taxes on the people of the state of New Jersey. ~ Chris Christie

We can't have deficit spending in Texas. You have to balance your budget every two years. ~ Rick Perry

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

Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. They've been whole years my mother's kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie – who is an actual musical genius – will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I – I know a little bit about a lot of things.
I can tell you the chemical composition of the stuff your stick in your hair; how long it would take you, at just under the speed of light, to get to Alpha Centauri – and how old your body would be when you finally got there; the middle name of the third president of the United States; the amount of the present budget deficit; the author of the Brothers Karamazov, and how many feet there are in a line of trochaic heptameter. The Little Girl Who Had to Know Why, Paul used to call me. But even my mother couldn't reconcile me and math. ~ Kristen D. Randle

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. ~ Mark Steyn

The federal budget deficit is the biggest single impediment to revitalizing the American economy. ~ Alice Rivlin

I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reforms. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship? ~ Robert M. Gates

The European Commission granted France an extra two years to meet its mandated budget deficit target of 3% of GDP. The deadline had already been extended by two years in 2013. It gave little explanation for the latest extension, which disappointed fiscal hawks. ~ Anonymous

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

Europe is right to tell us to reduce this [France's budget] deficit and spend less. Europe is right to demand this of us but cannot at the same time demand us to increase our dues. ~ Nicolas Sarkozy

There's a phrase that critics of economic forecasting like to use: Give an economist a result you want, and he'll find the numbers to justify it. This entire city is filled with number crunchers who look at the exact same data and interpret it in widely disparate ways on everything from the federal budget deficit to the Social Security surplus." "Meaning that data can be manipulated." "Of course it can, depending on who's paying the meter and whose political agenda is being furthered, ~ David Baldacci

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. ~ Francois Hollande

From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies ... ~ Niall Ferguson

You mentioned Ross Perot. Mr. Perot jumped into the race at the last minute, had one issue that he ran on, the budget deficit, was in and out of the race a couple of times, and still got 20 million votes, didn't have the Internet. ~ Hamilton Jordan

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

Recently the country has seen too much of our legislators, seeing them as a gaggle of check-kiting, judge-smearing deadbeats who don't pay their restaurant bills but raise their pay in the middle of the night. Many Americans-this columnist included-hitherto said tax increases are justified by the budget deficit now say: Give that mob more money? Never. Not a nickel of new taxes until term limits change the political culture on Capital Hill. ~ George Will

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the "mounting" deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches. ~ Dave Barry

History is replete with examples of tech firms that were marginalized by new companies and technologies. ~ Barry Ritholtz

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we've stolen almost $60 trillion from our children. ~ Steven Rattner

At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable. Once the economy begins to recover, you have to balance the budget. But it will also need additional revenues. Should the government not receive them, we will all get punished with higher interest rates. ~ George Soros

At one point in the journey, we're approaching the Arc de Triomphe.

"That's awesome," states Paul.

"My guidebook says that it's the resting place of the 'unknown soldier' and the flame never goes out," I announce proudly.

The taxi driver says something to Elizabeth, who is sitting in the front.

"Franz here, suggests that if the budget deficit gets any worse, they intend to turn the gas off except on Public Holidays."

"Still practically every day then! ~ Chambers Mars

To many Congressmen and Senators right now, there's a ceaseless antagonism toward Hollywood because politically, it is high-reward and low-risk. So when you can't do anything about poverty or the budget deficit, and you can't deal with Bosnia or the possibility of nuclear explosions in Russia, what do you do? You bash Hollywood and get on the front pages. ~ Jack Valenti

Deficits do not in themselves produce inflation, nor does a balanced budget assure a stable price level. ~ William Vickrey

It is like our foreign policy has attention deficit disorder. ~ Tim Ryan

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

The challenges presented by our budget crisis are some of the most difficult we have ever faced. We are -very simply put -adjusting to reality. These times, and our citizens, demand change. ~ Kathleen Blanco

If a budget is designed to show our values, it's clear where the majority stands: against opportunity, against education, and against America's hard-working, tax-paying middle class. ~ Ellen Tauscher

Unfortunately, we don't have a depth of African scriptwriters, so it's easier to Africanize something that already works. Local script writers are giving me James Bond budget scenes that I can't even produce. ~ Mo Abudu

The fact that the American government has formally set aside an enormous yearly budget of nearly $75 million to increase cultural exchanges in order to bring about what it calls "regime change" has muddied the waters and complicated American Studies in Iran more than anything else. ~ Mohammad Marandi

My desire to experiment comes from my attention-deficit approach to cosmetics. I just get really bored, really easily. ~ Paloma Faith

You may have heard that America doesn't have enough scientists and is in danger of "falling behind" (whatever that means) because of it. Tell this to an academic scientist and watch her laugh. For the last thirty years, the amount of the U.S. annual budget that goes to non-defense related research has been frozen. From a purely budgetary perspective, we don't have too few scientists, we've got far too many, and we keep graduating more each year. America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn't want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation... The list goes on and on. ~ Hope Jahren

Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century. ~ John Podhoretz

There was an advertisement in the newspaper for a teaching position in a school with the worst reputation in town, with the sort of class that no qualified teacher with all the parts of her brain correctly screwed together would voluntarily face. It was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had been invented. "There's no hope for these boys and girls," the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. "This is not education, this is storage." Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position attracted only one applicant, and she got those boys and girls to read Shakespeare. ~ Fredrik Backman

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

The bottom line is more tax money is going to be needed. Just how much will be the primary issue on the agenda when Congressional leaders meet with the President later today, Wednesday, May the 9th, 1990. And good morning, welcome to Today. It's a Wednesday morning, a day when the budget picture, frankly, seems gloomier than ever. It now seems the time has come to pay the fiddler for our costly dance of the Reagan years. ~ Bryant Gumbel

As we peer into society's future, we
you and I, and our government
must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

Wealthy queers support initiatives that lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then off-load reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers, who are predominantly women of color whose employment is often directly tied to their citizenship status. The politics of "leaning in" for a small layer of wealthy women has dovetailed with budget cuts and health care rollbacks that have left poor women at the mercy of misogynist, increasingly lethal anti-reproductive-rights legislation, and left poor, queer and trans* people without access to necessary medical resources like hormones or AIDS medication.

Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012.
Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides. ~ Tipu's Tiger

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other; it is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, as long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget - just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. In short, the paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. ~ Ronald Reagan

It's not about what the speaker wants. It's not about necessarily what I want. There's two other principles involved here. It's what the constituents in my district want, and they didn't want to raise the debt ceiling unless there were significant structural reforms and spending cuts to help us balance our budget. ~ Tim Huelskamp

I was the chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the chief architects the last time we balanced a budget, and it was the first time we had done it since man walked on the moon. We had a $5 trillion surplus and we cut taxes. ~ John Kasich

There are people I'm drawn to that you just can't do a tiny, no-budget movie with. I would like to pursue some of that stuff, to see if I could do a movie with some of those people. And I don't really write scripts myself, but if I read a script I thought was really great, I would totally be up for doing a more traditional movie. It's just that I don't exist in that world.
right now. ~ Joe Swanberg

This Budget reflects a choice - not an easy choice, but the right choice. And when you think about it, the only choice. The choice to take the responsible, prudent path to fiscal stability, economic growth and opportunity. ~ George Pataki

I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You're not limited to any particular running time. ~ George R R Martin

I don't think people understand when you say you are making a micro-budget film that you are getting paid no money. ~ Mary Elizabeth Winstead

If you want to find out how resourceful you can be, shrink your budget. Move your deadlines up. See how you cope. This may make you more resilient to actual hardships that inevitably arise. ~ Reid Hoffman

product excellence is now paramount to business success - not control of information, not a stranglehold on distribution, not overwhelming marketing power (although these are still important). There are a couple of reasons for this. First, consumers have never been better informed or had more choice.13 It used to be that companies could turn poor products into winners by dint of overwhelming marketing or distribution strength. Create an adequate product, control the conversation with a big marketing budget, limit customer choice, and you could guarantee yourself a good return. ~ Eric Schmidt

Am I doing the movie because I'm really excited about it and want to do it, or am I doing it because it seems like it's a big budget or something like that? It would still have to be the right thing, because my lifestyle's really cheap and I'm able to exist doing smaller movies, so if I'm able to do that, I'm happy to do that. But if something bigger came along that seems really cool, then that would be great. ~ Joe Swanberg

It [Hancock] happens to be a big budget film and big star like Will Smith, but it actually has a lot of weight to it. But it was very smart and very intelligent and had this kind of historical element to it that I was fascinated by. It's not silly. It's not stupid. It's fun, but I think it's smart. I think Akiva [Goldsman] writes really interesting material and there you have it. ~ Charlize Theron

Well, the whole trick to doing an independent film, is to keep great pace and momentum. You're shooting maybe three times as many scenes in one day that you would on a big, luxurious budget on a luxurious schedule, and you try not to sacrifice quality for that. Things are just compressed, but essentially the same. ~ Kevin Kline

In certain areas I don't function well and in other areas I function very well. I'm very good professionally. I have good discipline, I'm able to write every day and do films and not go six times over the budget. I mean I'm a coherent person, but I also don't like to go through tunnels when I travel. I'm claustrophobic. ~ Woody Allen

It is great to be a part of big-budget movies, but it is harder to feel like you are contributing, in the sense that it has such big machinery behind it. ~ Naomie Harris

When you only have a million dollar annual budget and a Super Bowl ad costs $4 million, you have to do something very creative to get onto the Super Bowl. ~ Allen St. Pierre

The only way to meet pressing social needs and be fiscally responsible is to cut the runaway Pentagon budget, which now almost equals the military spending of all other countries in the world combined. ~ Dennis Kucinich

Marla dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands as she watched the Coyotes struggle, without success, to make up the twelve-point deficit. It was hot in the arena, and the players were perspiring heavily. Neal was substituting often in order to give them water, but the heat was wearing them down, and the Cougars managed to outscore the Coyotes seventeen to two at the opening of the second half. ~ Barbara Casey

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

The goal of a church is not to have a bigger building or budget but to see the word of God increase and disciples multiply ~ Kevin DeYoung

But because we in the United States finance our current account deficit by borrowing in our own currency, we can move to a more competitive dollar without the adverse effects that followed currency declines in other countries. ~ Martin Feldstein

In the past, proactive fiscal polices almost always meant just more investment and an increase in the fiscal deficit. ~ Li Keqiang

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction. ~ Thomas Sowell