Jean Chretien Quotes

As American families and businesses have been forced to tighten their belts, Washington has refused to do the same.

Regardless of my legislation, spending has to be stopped.

There is only so much pain voters will tolerate. And there is insufficient reason to believe that today’s austerity will bring tomorrow’s prosperity.

When I became mayor of New York City, I had a $2.4 billion deficit. And everybody wanted me to raise taxes. I said, 'If I raise taxes, I'll drive people out of New York City, and then I'll be raising taxes again.' So what I did was I cut expenses by 15 percent.

When I took over, the economy had almost collapsed. I told Malawians we needed to pass through difficult times. Two days ago I even cut my own salary by 30% to show we are making sacrifices.

The cold harsh reality is that we have to balance the budget.

As Secretary of Defense my job would be much easier if I didn't have to put up with [budget] cuts.

Balancing the budget is like going to Heaven. Everybody wants to do it, but nobody wants to do what you have to do to get there.

Can the amazing national debt be paid by a little trifling sum squeezed from year to year out of America?.... Would it not be much superior wisdom, and sounder policy, for a distressed kingdom to retrench the vast unnecessary expenses continually incurred by its enormous vices?

The revenue you take in should be enough to cover the revenue that you spend and go beyond that to get a reserve. In order to do that we [in California] need cuts and pension reforms, and taxes.

Contrary to … conventional wisdom, the consequence of past U. S. Defense cuts were not bad …. austerity can be useful in forcing Washington to think strategically, something it rarely does when times are flush.

Austerity [in the Defense Department] meant that risks had to be managed, not eliminated.

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

I think it's essential that we do more than talk about austerity measures and cutting.

Increased spending, all these favors that we got to do for people - it's got to stop.

We are going to have to make some very difficult choices, because state government cannot continue to spend more than it takes in.

We've got to take some drastic steps in this country. We can't keep spending and spending.

I'm coming to Washington, D.C., to do the people's work. And the people's work has to do with reducing spending and cutting budgets and, and trying to get a grip on the size of government.

It's going to be true that anything that reduces the federal deficit will have somebody unhappy.

I think that, you know, this is a different year than most years. We've got to tell the American people that we have to live with less. We have a $13.5 trillion debt. And the only way to do that is an honest campaign with honest people.

Today is the day for the complaining to end and for statesmanship to begin. Today I am taking action to cut state spending and balance the budget this year.

No one cuts backs like he did. No one knows what a back is anymore.

I'd be a lot more excited about eliminating earmarks if we reduced all of the spending by whatever the earmarks used to be, but nobody's, apparently, going to talk about doing that.

I came to Congress to help reduce spending.

Look, I am not worried about Washington cutting too much spending too fast. I mean, the kinds of spending cuts we're talking about just right now are $100 billion out of a $3.7 trillion budget.