Roger Altman Quotes

Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.

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.

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.

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

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

When George W. Bush entered office, the national debt was $5 trillion. When he left, it was $10 trillion. I think the administration spent too much money.

The deficit - the U.S. knows our deficit is too large. We are committed to bringing it down. We are bringing it down. The deficit came in for fiscal year '05 at considerably below where it was the prior year.

There is a very serious fiscal-policy question of, 'Are we running our overall fiscal policy such that we as a government can pay our bills?'

If you raise taxes, it won't reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources.

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've got to start worrying about America. And if we don't start dealing with the debt we have and the deficit spending we have in Washington, politics doesn't matter, because the American people do realize that they have to balance their budgets.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

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

The debt ceiling serves no useful purpose.

I always think a debt ceiling is a good tool to carry something.

According to the White House, the president's proposed 2016-2017 spending would add - get this - $62 billion to the deficit.

I know economists will say well, we could run a small deficit but the problem is that once you cross that line as we see in the United States, nothing stops deficits from getting larger and larger and spiralling out of control.

It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

I have proposed I would not add a penny to the debt and [Donald Trump] plans would add $5 trillion to the debt.

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.

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

We can have tax cuts, but when we have tax cuts and do not have a surplus, the amount of the tax cut goes straight to the bottom line, adds to the deficit, and the deficit adds to the national debt, and sooner or later, the debt has to be paid.

It's all right to agree or disagree on the balanced budget amendment. It's all right to talk about how we're going to appropriate.

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

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