Howard Dean Quotes

In the non-defense side of the budget a very large proportion of the budget is for entitlements like Social Security and Mediacre which are obligations that must be paid. The remainder, the smaller part is everything else--funding the cabinet departments, all the medical and sdcientific research, all the federal aid to public dchools and police departments, all the welfare, foodstamp and other programs for the poor, the costs of the Federal COurt System, the White House, the Congress, the State Department, foreign aid, Homeland security, weatehr forcasting, all the agricultural programs, and viirtually everything the governmetn does. In 2017 President Donals Trump submitted a budget to COngress that increased defense spending by a fulll 10 percent, and gave a hugh tax cut for the wealthy and the corporations. To balance the budget, he propsoed eliminateing man of the existing progrms like "Meals on Wheels" which brings at least 1 hot meal a day to homebound poor eldertly people, and a host of other critical programs. He had no previous experience with a government budget which was thoudands of times larger and more complex than any budget he had ever seen. So many in Congress, in both partiesd, were very critical of the budget and Congress then started to create its own buget. This quote expressed the heart of the problem.

After many years of deficit financing, Clinton finally produced a balanced budget and together with his Secretary, of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, actually developed an economy which was producing a huge annual surplus that would soon eliminate the national debt. However, when George W. Bush replaced Clinton after two terms, Bush was unable to manage the budget any better than the other aspects of the Presidency. He cut taxes dramatically and even after it was clear that the Clinton surplus was squandered, he continued tax reductions and even increased them while increasing government spending creating the biggest government in history and went from our largest surplus to our largest deficit in his 8 years.

Attacking opponent Ronald Reagan's campaign promises:. Anderson lost the election. Reagan made good on the last two of the three promises, but ran up the largest deficits in American history.

This was a variation of the quotation of Canadian Minister of Finance, Jean Chretien, a decade earlier.

In 1964 the treasury secretary asked the president how to sell the proposed budget to Congress:

After the Stock Market crash of 1929, Republican politicians promised "recovery is right around the corner." But La Guardia disagreed:

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.

An unusual feature of the American governmental budgeting process is that Congress has passed a law limiting the amount of debt that the United States can maintain. When there is deficit financing, the law limiting the debt has to be changed periodically as the nation approaches the debt limit. Partisan politicians often take advantage of the fact that the debt limit must be passed and hold the passage hostage to obtaining something they want. The reality is that when Congress passed the previous budgets, they determined what the debt would have to be later. So they have already voted to exceed the budget ceiling. But the requirement of doing it in a second forum allows more pressure to be placed on the administration and the other party’s Congress members. While this process is ongoing, many people in the world are worried and often terrorized by the prospect of the debt ceiling not being passed, in which case the United States would have to default on its obligations—not pay interest, contractors, retirements, salaries, etc. Hence the admonition that the debt ceiling should never be a part of the budget negotiating process by most responsible statesmen and women. But the mist partisan of the politicians want to play politics with the debt ceiling precisely because the stakes are so high and they can get both headlines and leverage.

This position angered the extreme conservatives and the extreme liberals who both opposed him in 2012. However, the majority of the state supported him and he was elected on this middle of the road platform with most of the activists against him.

Most Republicans at the time would argue for government spending reductions except for defense spending for which they wanted an increase in most cases despite huge waste and abuse in the Department of Defense. (See {615006} for just one example). Mulvaney, a new congressman with Tea Party backing, pointed out the hypocrisy of the this Republican position over the last decades, but this had been a central part of the Ronald Reagan platform.