Amity Shlaes Quotes

I'm for a balanced budget now.

You know, even people who talk about cutting spending and they go 'That's not the spending that I was actually talking about that you're supposed to be cutting.' Well, we have to be looking across the board.

The American people know that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

I have a record as governor. I have a record of cutting spending. And I talked yesterday not only about we ought to cut spending, I talked about how we've cut spending in Mississippi and how if you did the same things in the federal government, you would save tens of billions of dollars a year.

I was able to promote a strong defense budget when it could have been cut a lot more severely.

States, virtually all of them, have a constitutional requirement to operate on a balanced budget.

I am a deficit hawk.

There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.

Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.

I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets.

We need real leadership, Democrat, Republican and independent to stand up and say, we have to live within our means.

I personally do not worship at the alter of a balanced budget.

Like Ike [President Eisenhower] did. Talk economy and then spend away.

Washington has to stop spending money we don’t have for projects we don’t want.

The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.

I was fortunate, I guess, to be part of some good fiscal discipline in the Bush administration. The budget I put forward was a balanced budget.

I do think a focus on fiscal restraint is a central element of the Tea Party, and thank goodness for it!

We are the ones that are trying to get Washington spending under control so it can live within its means.

With its record spending and deficits, the Obama administration has shown little interest in taking fiscal responsibility. That is a mistake.

To simply argue that public spending must always go up and never be cut is irresponsible.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses.

I don't think I can sell to our voters in our district that there's nothing to cut in the federal budget. Nobody, I think, sees that or would agree with that.

I think to balance the budget, probably every federal department has to take cuts in my opinion.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

I look at this in a very simple way: I want to bring the debt down.