John McCain Quotes

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.

I think I should pay more taxes... but everything they take from me should go to reduce the 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.

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.

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.

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.

We want to make sure that tax reform doesn't increase the size of the deficit.

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.

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

To the extent that we've got a fiscal crisis right now, part of it is prompted by a bullheaded insistence on the part of the president, for example, that we should extend all of his tax cuts, make all of them permanent.

I support responsible spending, and balancing the budget, but this tax cut and the budget cuts of last month accomplish neither of these goals.

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

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

President Obama inherited a one trillion dollar deficit courtesy of George Bush and turned it into a three trillion dollar deficit courtesy of Karl Marx!

[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.

What Donald Trump is proposing with these massive tax cuts will result in a $20 trillion additional national debt. That will have dire consequences for Social Security and Medicare.

The message coming out of Washington, especially from our leftist politicians and the news media, is that we solve our budget problems by raising taxes on the rich. If Americans were more informed, such a message would be insulting to our intelligence. There are not enough rich people to satisfy Congress' appetite.

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.

You remember had this gigantic clock in the arena showing the size of the national debt. And Paul told America, if you elect Republicans, we can fix that. But, if Paul Ryan was being honest, he would've pointed to the debt clock and said, we built that.

I'm not going to raise taxes; I'm not going to have a wage increase for public employees.

We are worried about the size of the deficit, which is why the president is pleased that the House and Senate have followed his lead in cutting the deficit in half over the next five years.