Christina Romer Quotes
We're committed to working with Congress to doing what the president said he was always going to do, which is cut the deficit in half over the - over his first term.
Romer, Christina D. Interview by John King. State of the Union, CNN, 12 July 2009.
After many years of deficit financing, Clinton finally produced a balanced budget and together with his Secretary, of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, actually developed an economy which was producing a huge annual surplus that would soon eliminate the national debt. However, when George W. Bush replaced Clinton after two terms, Bush was unable to manage the budget any better than the other aspects of the Presidency. He cut taxes dramatically and even after it was clear that the Clinton surplus was squandered, he continued tax reductions and even increased them while increasing government spending creating the biggest government in history and went from our largest surplus to our largest deficit in his 8 years.
The Clinton budget was a very unusual one. He and Treasury Sectary Robert Rubin determined that the large deficit built up in the previous administrations and the high interest rate were competing with the private sector for investment capital. Therefore the budget raised taxes and took other steps to reduce the largest deficit then in American History. Virtually all of the Republicans saw disaster for the economy with this budget and even some of the fiscal conservatives from Clinton’s own party were opposed. The budget passed by a single vote in the House, and that started the largest economic growth period in American History. The economy became so strong that Clinton was able to produce a balanced budget, eliminate the Reagan deficit and produce more new jobs than any administration in American history. The prediction that the budget would cause the country to fail was, not only wrong, but the budget caused the nation to succeed, beyond what any thought possible. See {626772} for one of the warnings from his own party.
Christina Duckworth Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.
