Dick Cheney Quotes

The deficit only became a big problem in the Reagan-Bush years. For 12 years, Republican presidents talked about balancing the budget, but failed to propose one.

Like Ike [President Eisenhower] did. Talk economy and then spend away.

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.

The American people know that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

Even with not having a balanced budget at this time, I support tax cuts. That will help limit spending.

There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.

Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit, once so incomprehensibly large that it had eleven zeroes, will be, simply zero.

I'm for a balanced budget now.

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

How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program - and not explode the deficit and national debt?

I am a fiscal conservative.

We are worried about the size of the deficit, which is why the president is pleased that the House and Senate have followed his lead in cutting the deficit in half over the next five years.

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.

Cutting budget deficits can never be just an exercise in economics.

Bush has never sent over a balanced budget.

In a clean break from the Obama years, and frankly from the years before this president, we will keep federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, or less. That is enough. The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth, or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government.

We've not had one Republican president in 34 years balance the budget. You can't trust right-wing Republicans with your money. You ought to hire somebody who has balanced a budget. I'm much more conservative with money than George Bush is.

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

When Mr. Obama entered office, he said all the right things about getting Washington spending under control. He even promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Obviously, that didn't happen.

We had a $10 billion budget deficit when we got here in January of 2003. We cut that budget deficit; we did not raise taxes; we came back in '05, and we had an $8 billion surplus. That's how fast it can happen.

I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.

I personally do not worship at the alter of a balanced budget.

Tonight I come before you to announce that the Federal Deficit will be simply zero.

Let’s make this the year where we are either going to get rid of the deficit or get rid of the idea that we are going to get rid of the deficit..

Although virtually all Republicans campaign on fiscal restraint, how many actually care about it deeply?