George Osborne Quotes

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

The government is determined to continue the process of fiscal consolidation and structural reform in order to secure sound public finances and improve the country's international competitiveness.

We have a spending problem, not a taxing problem. The less we spend, the more jobs we have the potential to create.

The more we can do to address fiscal austerity, the better our markets will do, and there is a real political shift to doing that.

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.

Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury.

Look, I don't dispute that the deficit has increased.

Gradual fiscal consolidation may also be stimulative in the short run.

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

Memo to Congress: America's problem is not that government is too small. It's the spending, stupid!

When gross public debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP, economic growth tends to decline considerably.

If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.

I am not wrong in the belief that its public funds are more secure than those of all the European powers.

I will work to restore fiscal responsibility to our country's budget and to provide for a more robust economy.

The debt ceiling at some point has to be raised. I don't think there's anybody that questions the fact that if we ended up getting in a situation where the U.S. government was sending out IOUs like the state of California did at one point, that ends up creating quite a brand problem for our country.

We agree with Simpson and Bowles and others who have looked at this. What's necessary is to stabilize the debt and then work from there. You can't balance the budget in the short term because to do that would be to ratchet down the economy.

The best deficit reduction program is a growing economy.

Fiscal discipline can turn the economy around.

Look at what happened in the 1990s: when they balanced the federal budget, it was through growth in the economy and controlling spending.

The political gridlock in Washington leads us to conclude that policymakers don't have the ability to put the public finances of the U.S. on a sustainable footing.

Getting the budget balanced, regulatory reform, tax reform - I think these lead to economic growth.

Any move to reduce government spending is a positive for the economy.

Not in the constitution, but I would propose a law to the French parliament that provides for reducing the budget deficit year by year, until we have reached a balanced budget by 2017.

But I think the global economy will understand that the United States has the ability to meet its obligations. But it's not going to be able to do it over the long term if we can't control the growth of government.

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.