Lawrence O'Donnell Quotes

According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Donald Trump's tax plan is going to increase the national debt by more than 50 percent over ten years.

All Democrats for the last 30 years have tried to stimulate the economy by giving 'tax cuts' to people who don't pay taxes.

We ought to pay down the national debt, ... The American people are tired of people who make promises about cutting taxes that they cannot keep.

There is a lot of fiscal conservatives in the United States senate that didn't vote for that because we understand that national security spending is not the reason why we have a debt. Our debt is being driven by the way Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and, by the way, the interest on the debt is structured in the years to come.

If you're really concerned about deficits, you cannot take seriously a budget that would give $30 billion a year worth of tax cuts to not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent.

Well, my plan, actually Larry Kudlow, who's a fantastic guy, I think likes my plan the most. I'm cutting taxes by about the most.

I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion-dollar deficit. ... This notion that somehow we caused the deficits is just wrong. It's just not true. ... If they start trying to give you a bunch of facts and figures suggesting that it's true, what they're not telling you is they baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts and a prescription drug plan that they didn't pay for and the wars.

We must move from revenue-neutral to revenue-reducing tax reform, because the federal government spends far too much money.

What the Trump tax plan is a plan to give tiny little tax cuts to most Americans, raise taxes on perhaps one in five families and shower benefits on people who earn millions of dollars a year. And this fits with a fundamental principle the Republicans have been pursuing for a long time. The rich aren't investing and creating jobs, because they don't have nearly enough money, and so we need to get them money. And the way the Republicans want to get it to them is tax cuts first, and then to take away help for children, the disabled, the elderly and the poor.

Something got screwed up in terms of your priorities if you think it's more important to get rid of the dividend tax than it is to take care of 11 million kids.

There's no reason to raise taxes. Taxes should be lower... The problem we have is that government spends too much, not that taxes are too low.

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.

In the current law we're seeing Social Security dwindle. And so what we're saying is if we're going to reduce taxes we just want to make sure that there are things within the law that pay for it.

Sadly, the President's budget proposal for the upcoming year once again puts cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans over addressing our country's severe fiscal problems.

To be fair, Republicans are not blameless. The deficit began to spiral out of control on President Bush's watch.

When I see the sort of mindless tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to education, I just think we've got it exactly backward in this country.

It is foolish for Republicans to continue opening the door to job-killing tax hikes while Democrats refuse to explain how they propose to reform mandatory spending - mostly entitlements - that makes up almost two-thirds of the federal budget.

Some of the huge tax breaks that we gave to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population in this country during the Bush era have contributed significantly to the deficit.

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.

I want to make it very clear that this middle-class tax cut, in my view, is central to any attempt we're going to make to have a short-term economic strategy and a long-term fairness strategy, which is part of getting this country going again.

I want taxes to be less, that the people may have more.

The kind of plan that Donald [Tramp] has put forth would be trickle-down economics all over again. In fact, it would be the most extreme version, the biggest tax cuts for the top percent of the people in this country than we've ever had.

By the way, my tax cut is the biggest since Ronald Reagan. I'm very proud of it.

It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

The bottom line is more tax money is going to be needed. Just how much will be the primary issue on the agenda when Congressional leaders meet with the President later today, Wednesday, May the 9th, 1990. And good morning, welcome to Today. It’s a Wednesday morning, a day when the budget picture, frankly, seems gloomier than ever. It now seems the time has come to pay the fiddler for our costly dance of the Reagan years.