Douglas Alexander Quotes

The total impact of the Tory/Liberal tax, welfare and public spending changes has hit the poorest 10% in society disproportionately hard - and women have been affected even more badly than men.

What you do on immigration policy, what you do on education policy, what you do on tax, regulatory, and energy policy, all connects together - and will be based on a simple determination about what will make life better in America for American citizens.

It is easier to use accounting gimmicks than it is to make hard political choices

We want public services but we do not want to pay for them

The government has, in all countries, a vast influence, in determining the character of the national consumption; not only because it absolutely directs the consumption of the state itself, but because a great proportion of the consumption of individuals is gained by its will and example.

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.

Every Congressman, every Senator knows precisely what causes inflation...but can't, support the drastic reforms to stop it because it could cost him his job

I would rather have the costs of consumer goods and restaurants - products we as consumers can choose to buy or not buy - go up and the need for public services go down.

I'm not going to be reduced to the position of being the implementer of Tory cuts in the North.

Most Americans want their government to be smaller, not larger; they want their taxes to be lower, not higher.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

If, before 2020, there is a choice between further spending cuts, more borrowing and tax rises, the priority must be to avoid tax increases. They would disrupt consumption, employment and investment.

While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.

Europe's younger generation has only experienced austerity.

Since taking office in 2008, the Barrow Administration failed to stimulate the necessary economic growth. Instead they have, over the more than four years, continued on a path of borrow and spend, accumulating huge additional debts.

Sinn Fein will not do Tory austerity.

The borrow-spend-and-centralize agenda that has been so destructive to job creation elsewhere in America has been a gravy boat inside the Beltway.

In contrast to them, Republicans argue, are minorities, organized workers, and women, who demand government policies that can only be paid for with tax dollars sucked from white men.

The only way governments or would-be governments respond to ills these days is by seeking to lower the temperature... and that tends to mean public spending.

The Clinton years were not an economic Nirvana; as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers during part of this time, I'm all too aware of mistakes and lost opportunities.

The sheer scale of what the Tories are attempting to do is staggering. But Sinn Fein will not agree to this ideologically driven austerity agenda.

I think it is wrong to balance the budget on the backs of local government.

For far too long, virtually every time Americans have been asked to make 'tough choices,' it has resulted in disproportionate harm for hardworking Americans and retirees.

Cutting the fiscal deficit is not popular. That is the experience of all governments in all countries. Expenditure cuts hurt certain vested interests, and they don't like it.

Barack Obama's enemies are the people who make this country work. Barack Obama's enemies are those who succeed. Those are the people whose income he wants to redistribute. Those are the people whose income he wants to take, using the power and the force of the federal government to do it.