Jason Chaffetz Quotes

The debt ceiling serves no useful purpose.

There's no reason to raise taxes. Taxes should be lower... The problem we have is that government spends too much, not that taxes are too low.

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 we don't get a grip on government spending, there will be no growth.

Fiscal policy is not just, or even not even principally, the purview of the president.

The fact is, almost every year since the founding of these United States, our government has lived beyond its means.

We know this much about how Barack Obama plans to govern: He will deploy the fattest checkbook ever at the disposal of an incoming American president.

I've criticized Republicans for their lack of fiscal discipline when they controlled Congress before 2007. However, that is no excuse to just continue with more of the same or, as the case is now, to make it worse. Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's budget, we will double the national debt in five years and triple it in 10.

As we all know, the budget decisions which give rise to increased debt are what counts, and the debt is just a by-product of those budget decisions.

Our system of keeping the federal government's books is a monument to the creativity of mankind ... We've cut government spending for 15 years in a row, and yet have spent more money in each of those years.

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.

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

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

If Washington were a factory, it would manufacture spending.

Federal spending is like a massive ship that takes a very long time to turn.

Washington does not tax too little: it spends way too much.

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

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

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

Now we are raising the debt limit 3 times, up to $8 trillion, so that our children and our grandchildren will have to pay for the cost of our expenditures.

Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have criticized Bush for his big increases in spending, which far exceed those of the Clinton era.

Government is just spending too much money.

What you really want to do is sit down and find a place that you can control government spending and raise more revenue.

The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.