Milton Friedman Quotes
The real problem with the government is not the deficit; it is that the government spends too much money.
Milton Friedman, 1912-2006, 1912-2006, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Interview, PBS The Charlie Rose Show, December 26, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time, the George W. Bush Administration policy was to have the United States running a very large trade and budget deficit—the largest in the history of the world. In order to finance the deficit, the U. S. Government had to borrow money and it did so by selling bonds and other financial instruments. Many of these were purchased by Asians, but Paul’s point was that they were “propping up” American spending habits and might not continue to do so.
Although the Professor was often right about this technique, at the time he made this statement, the Clinton administration was actually cutting spending and using much of the revenue to pay for the deficit—just the opposite of what the Professor was worried about. It was successful and the deficit was eliminated and surpluses were projected. However the succeeding administration more closely followed the professor’s pattern and increased spending enormously for serious needs, but also cut taxes, so that we went during the Bush administration from the largest projected surplus in American history to the greatest deficit in American history.
This quotation is attributed to the Senator by hundreds of sources, many very relaiable. This indicates to us that it was a line he used on several occasions. However the Dirksen Center staff has not been able to find the quotation amongst his writings and his radio and television appearances that they have transcripts for.
Both the House and the Senate, as they got larger, developed an Appropriations Committee. When the committee assessed a departmental appropriation, they had also the responsibility for all the other departmental budgets. However, many of the members of the Appropriations Committee tended to favor the interests of their particular constituency or the special interests to which they were beholden. Other members had little or no influence. So there was immense pressure during Reconstruction to ‘share’ the appropriations ‘plum’ by creating appropriations subcommittees. However, each particular subcommittee loses the perspective of and interest in the budget as a whole. The process has led to budget imbalance pressure ever since. But Randall, the Speaker of the House warned about exactly what would happen. He had earlier served as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and he was exactly right.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
