Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes
Actively search for spending bills that I can veto as a sign of … financial stewardship.
Roosevelt understood the value of symbols in forming public perception, and vetoes are often used by presidents to create a symbolic message.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945, 32nd President of the United States (Democrat, NY), Instructions to is staff, Quoted in New York Times Book Review, April 13, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although Reagan vetoed some spending that he disapproved of, he wanted so much spending on his favorite programs that he not only never brought the budget under control but his spending created the largest deficit in American history -- until George W. Bush squandered the Clinton surplus and exceeded Regan’s spending greatly and left President Obama with the greatest budget deficit in world history and a collapsing economy. Ironically, despite the fact that Reagan ran up huge deficits for the time, he always verbally advocated balanced budgets and many people in the country were persuaded by Reagan of the importance of balanced budgets. It was President Clinton who balanced the budget and eliminated the Reagan deficits.
Perry was one of a number of politicians who became opposed to deficit spending, and claimed that the public was not interested in the various projects. However, whenever any of these politicians proposed projects or programs to cut, there would be many citizens who would object vehemently. It was precicely because there was a constituency supporting all the government programs that politicians found it so hard to keep spending under control. Indeed, when others suggested terminating spending on programs and projects Perry liked, he objected as strenuously as most others.
1st Viscount Snowden
President Jefferson in 1803, in the first instance of presidential impoundment, deferred for a few months the building of gunboats for which Congress had appropriated funds. In 1876 the President actually refused to spend the congressionally appropriated funds for river and harbor improvements in the midst of bad economic times:
In 1964 the treasury secretary asked the president how to sell the proposed budget to Congress:
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation. It shows that when FDR was first elected, he had a classic view of deficit spending. However, above all, Roosevelt was a pragmatist and not an ideologue. Faced with the Great Depression that was not getting much better, Roosevelt turned around, changed his mind and policy about deficits and embarked on the “pump priming” approach of injecting substantial Federal spending into the economy and accepting the deficits in order to improve the situation which had been stagnant. FDR’s new policy staved off total disaster, but few remember that his great success was a total reversal of his earlier views.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.
