Iain Duncan Smith Quotes

Stay on the path that the Democratic Party has us on, we're going to be in a mountain range of debt.

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.

The country is facing a fiscal crisis, and the United States Senate is at the center of the debate about how to bring federal spending under control.

Under President Obama, we have spent more money - he has spent more money than any other president in this history, actually, the combined total from Washington up to George W. Bush. President Obama has racked up more spending, $1 trillion deficits. And it's time that he join us in this effort to get our fiscal house in order.

Most of the major increases in the debt ceiling have been accompanied by structural changes in the way we raise and spend money.

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

If I hear one more Republican tell me about balancing the budget, I am going to strangle them.

The president says we need to raise the debt ceiling because America pays its bills. No if we paid our bills we wouldn't have all this debt. The reason we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we can't pay our bills and we have to borrow money because we don't have any money to pay our bills.

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.

I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this [the national debt].

We need to balance the budget and force Washington to stop spending more than it takes in.

The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.

Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.

The problem with our deficit is not because Americans are taxed too little. The problem with the deficit is because Washington spends too much money. We have got to stop spending money we don't have.

I must express my protest against continually increasing the debt without taking positive steps to slow its growth.

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.

[Deficits are] a yawner. We, as Republicans, have talked about deficits and balanced budgets since the days of Roosevelt, and the people simply haven't listened, because they can't relate to those huge numbers.

This country right now owes $19 trillion. And they need somebody like me to straighten out that mess.

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the "mounting" deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches.

[D]ebt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

When this president was sworn into office, he was handed a deficit of over a trillion dollars. Republicans were in control of Congress for much of the time that President George W. Bush was in office, and they didn't do a great job of controlling spending.

Now, 'the fiscal cliff' is a name that the media came up with, but some of us have been saying for years, 'You have got to stop the out of control federal spending, or you will end up at this point.' We're there.

We can have tax cuts, but when we have tax cuts and do not have a surplus, the amount of the tax cut goes straight to the bottom line, adds to the deficit, and the deficit adds to the national debt, and sooner or later, the debt has to be paid.

It's all right to agree or disagree on the balanced budget amendment. It's all right to talk about how we're going to appropriate.