The course of unbalanced budgets is the road to ruin
We are spending a little more than we are raising each year and you wonder how long it can go on. It is too easy for us to borrow.
The state of our state is fragile …. Our revenue system is broken because it has relied on regressive and unstable taxes …. I refuse to balance this budget on the backs of the children, the elderly, and the poor.
It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.
When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.
We cannot collect enough taxes to catch up with spending. Do I know a solution? Not really. Do your politicians know a solution? Does our commander-in-chief offer a solution? Absolutely not.
Balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief.
Eisenhower admitted that the budget can't be balanced and McCarthy said the communists are taking over. You don't know what to worry about these days - whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn.
I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.
Bush has never sent over a balanced budget.
