Barack Obama Quotes
I’m going to keep on working to get rid of the sequester. You get up and do your jobs every day; let’s make sure Washington gets up and does its job. And what makes me frustrated is sometimes the very folks who say they stand with our military proudly are the same ones who are standing in the way of fixing the sequester. It’s important to look at deeds and not words.
Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States (Democrat, IL), United States Senator (Democrat, IL), Speech, Marine Corps Camp Pendleton, California, August 7, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
After many years of deficit financing, Clinton finally produced a balanced budget and together with his Secretary, of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, actually developed an economy which was producing a huge annual surplus that would soon eliminate the national debt. However, when George W. Bush replaced Clinton after two terms, Bush was unable to manage the budget any better than the other aspects of the Presidency. He cut taxes dramatically and even after it was clear that the Clinton surplus was squandered, he continued tax reductions and even increased them while increasing government spending creating the biggest government in history and went from our largest surplus to our largest deficit in his 8 years.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation. It shows that when FDR was first elected, he had a classic view of deficit spending. However, above all, Roosevelt was a pragmatist and not an ideologue. Faced with the Great Depression that was not getting much better, Roosevelt turned around, changed his mind and policy about deficits and embarked on the “pump priming” approach of injecting substantial Federal spending into the economy and accepting the deficits in order to improve the situation which had been stagnant. FDR’s new policy staved off total disaster, but few remember that his great success was a total reversal of his earlier views.
This was a variation of the quotation of Canadian Minister of Finance, Jean Chretien, a decade earlier.
In 1964 the treasury secretary asked the president how to sell the proposed budget to Congress:
In 1775 England had amassed a large national debt and was looking to the American colonies as one source of revenue for debt reduction.
Perry was one of a number of politicians who became opposed to deficit spending, and claimed that the public was not interested in the various projects. However, whenever any of these politicians proposed projects or programs to cut, there would be many citizens who would object vehemently. It was precicely because there was a constituency supporting all the government programs that politicians found it so hard to keep spending under control. Indeed, when others suggested terminating spending on programs and projects Perry liked, he objected as strenuously as most others.
This position angered the extreme conservatives and the extreme liberals who both opposed him in 2012. However, the majority of the state supported him and he was elected on this middle of the road platform with most of the activists against him.
This is a perennial problem whenever the Chief's of Staff want to cut any program. Even if the program is a failure or is no longer needed Congress fights cuts tooth and nail. Then they make speeches decrying government spending and especially waste, when the vast majority of the waste is in programs or operations upon which they have insisted.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
