Barack Obama Quotes

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

How do you balance the budget, cut taxes and increase defense spending at the same time? It's very simple. You do it with mirrors.

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

The reason Congress hasn't balanced the budget is that the sky hasn't fallen lately.

You can't balance the budget on the backs of nondefense discretionary spending.

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.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

Bush has never sent over a balanced budget.

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

The problem is government spends too much. So raising taxes is what politicians do, instead of reducing spending.

A long term tax cut is not a tax cut at all unless it is accompanied by a spending cut.

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

Let us act with our eyes open. We are going to have a deficit next fiscal year and the year after that.

He [President Ronald Reagan] has tried to balance the budget on the backs of state and local government.

Let’s make this the year where we are either going to get rid of the deficit or get rid of the idea that we are going to get rid of the deficit..

We give lip service to the importance of deficit reduction, but Americans oppose every single thing that you might do to reduce the deficit.

Never in the nation’s history had a president proposed large, simultaneous spending increases and tax cuts when the federal budget already had a deficit.

Last year 100,000 people gathered on The Mall to Protest the deficit. We Republicans, over and over, castigated President Obama for creating a Trillion dollar deficit. I was against big deficits then, and I am agaist them now. Just because it is now Republicans doing all the spending, I am still opposed.... Those Republcians who voted for a tax cut and a spending increase are hypocrites.

If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.

Look at what happened in the 1990s: when they balanced the federal budget, it was through growth in the economy and controlling spending.

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

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

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.

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.

Of course we have to address the deficit if we win.