Richard Armitage Quotes

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.

Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch.

I think the recovery hasn't been stronger because the hole that was dug for President Obama by the Bush administration was far worse than anybody could imagine, first of all.

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

What our Republican friends are doing, if we look at what they do and not what they say, they have decided that the most important thing in this country is to increase payments for interest on the national debt.

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.

When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'

We're all concerned about the budget. We're all concerned about what's happening financially in our country. There's no question about it. Congress is working day and night. In fact, every time I go home the lights are on at the top of the Capitol.

We know this much about how Barack Obama plans to govern: He will deploy the fattest checkbook ever at the disposal of an incoming American president.

Unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcy - the cure is not more government spending, but helping businesses create jobs.

This program that the Republican majority has taken us toward as a country is leading us to fiscal bankruptcy.

We know that Medicare's going broke in seven years, but we need to start over. That's what the American people want us to do.

We can't continue to kick the can when it comes to the fiscal state of this country.

Americans know that we cannot tax and spend our way out of a recession, yet Democrats can't grasp this simple fact.

But we should not lose sight of how far we are coming and what a big hole we were left by George W. Bush.

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.

He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of Public Credit, and it sprung upon its feet.

Our national finances are in a ruinous state.

When President Bush left office, the deficit was approximately $500 billion. It is now approximately now $1.5 trillion. In other words, President Obama has essentially tripled the deficit.

The federal government is enormous; it never shrinks. And the interest is killing us.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us with $19 trillion in debt.

That is what happened in 2010. The administration and the leadership of the Republicans thought, 'Well, we're making a deal together; we're showing the world things can be done in a bi-partisan way. We're extending all our tax cuts for two years.'

The number of jobs created under President Barack Obama's stimulus turned out to be fewer than the number we would have had if the government had done nothing - according to the Obama administration's own analysis. So we got $9 trillion of debt with almost nothing to pay for it.

When my husband was president, we went from a $300 billion deficit to a $200 billion surplus and we were actually on the path to eliminating the national debt. When President Obama came into office, he inherited the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. He has cut the deficit by two-thirds.