Herbert Stein Quotes

Both candidates for president talk about balancing the budget ten years from now. Even if they win, they won't be in office then.

The current budget that the Republicans are looking at never balances. How can that be fiscally responsible? And how can we look at the public with a straight face and say yes we ran on balanced budgets.

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.

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.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

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.

Bush has never sent over a balanced budget.

I am a deficit hawk.

If you ask people do you think that government should spend less money than what it takes in, most people agree with that.

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.

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.

I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses.

The public understands that the government is broke, but many still don't want to cut programs they enjoy or depend on.

Both parties recognize the fundamental danger the country's debt poses to our nation's future, but President Obama's policies have not reflected that reality. By the end of his first term, his administration will have nearly doubled our public debt.

Many respected economists and statesmen believe our national debt is neither unwieldy nor a dangerous burden on the country. The trouble is that a vast majority of the American people think otherwise.... It violates basic American ideas of thrift and money management. These strong public feelings cannot be ignored forever.

There is a lot of fiscal conservatives in the United States senate that didn't vote for that because we understand that national security spending is not the reason why we have a debt. Our debt is being driven by the way Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and, by the way, the interest on the debt is structured in the years to come.

If the US government spends 40 percent of the nation's income, as it does through either borrowing or taxes, that income is not available for people to spend. The deficit is an indirect method of taxation. Of course, politicians prefer to borrow instead of tax because then someone down the road has to deal with the consequences.

Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.

The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.

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.

Imagine bringing Canada into a trillion-and-a-half of deficit. That's insane.

When George Bush came into office, we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually. When George Bush came into office, our national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it.