Bill White Quotes

A dynamic economy, with more citizens working and paying taxes, will be our strongest tool to bring down budget deficits

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution ... an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

A national debt, properly funded and serviced, can be a potent instrument of national policy.

Defaulting on our [national] debt is defaulting on America.

Look, I don't dispute that the deficit has increased.

I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

America knows it has got to deal with its deficit problems so that it, too, can promise it is making its proper and best contributions to the world economy.

The best deficit reduction program is a growing economy.

The biggest enemy of the United States is not some terrorist hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility

It took the first 204 years of our Nation's history to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. And now we are doing that every 2 or 3 years.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

I've got a chart here that shows our debt-to-GDP ratio. And while we did run deficits in the past, we now number our debt in trillions rather than in billions. And I think that represents a long-term danger, especially to the, the American dream.

It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy.

The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.

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.

For the last 4 years, our Federal Government has produced the four biggest deficits in history, and the estimated 2006 deficit of $423 billion is projected to be the largest of all.

We cannot cut our way to prosperity.

China, Japan, and Asia in general have been happy to hold U.S. debt instruments in recent decades, but they will not prop up our spending habits forever…. The greatest threat facing America today is not terrorism, or foreign economic competition, or illegal immigration. 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 better to implement reforms in times of economic strength.

You just don't see people running through the streets to have the deficit cut.

I do not pretend to step out of my own sphere and to control the internal management of other departments, but it seems to me that as Secretary of the Treasury, I may ask, that, while peace continues, the aggregate of the expenditure of those departments be kept within bounds such as will preserve the equilibrium between the national revenue and expenditure without recurrence to loans.