Barack Obama Quotes

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.

Today we care about budgets more than anything. Our American future hangs on the ability of government to cut budget.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

When George Bush came into office, we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually. When George Bush came into office, our national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it.

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

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.

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.

The deficit - the U.S. knows our deficit is too large. We are committed to bringing it down. We are bringing it down. The deficit came in for fiscal year '05 at considerably below where it was the prior year.

The deficit had become a symbol of our inability to control and manage the cost of government.

The budget doesn't have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn't have much control over the budget.

This country doesn't have a revenue problem - it has a spending problem.

Gentlemen, if we don't cut spending we will be bankrupt. Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live. Should we withhold the medicine? No. We are not wrong. We did not seek election and win in order to manage the decline of a great nation.

We are not going to let Donald Trump bankrupt America the way he bankrupted his casinos.

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

I served on the budget committee in the Senate, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday when we had a hearing in which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn't really need to pay down the debt - outrageous in my view.

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

I lowered taxes in New York. I reduced the size of government in New York. I took a $2.4 billion deficit and turned it into a $3.2 billion surplus. And I reduced taxes over 23 times or 23 times.

The number one priority now is reducing the deficit that they [Labour] left us - the biggest deficit since the Second World War.