Budgets & Budgeting Quotes
See {617208} his grandfather’s related statement.
The Congressman was notorious for his extreme and unusual views of things. See {606976} for another of his extreme statements which turned out to be untrue. McFadden quotations are sometimes used to show that there is almost no limit to how absurd a view a politician in general, or a member of Congress in particular, might take and make public.
Wilson was very candid that there would be high cost to war and sacrifice would be needed. See {584570} for other similar candor. This quotation was often used by critics of George W. Bush who initiated the Iraq War and then cut taxes for the rich, but then financed the war through the budgetary emergency appropriations bypassing the budget rules that the revenue must be specified to pay for it. His administration even claimed at an early stage in the war that the oil revenue from Iraq oil would defray the costs.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation. It shows that when FDR was first elected, he had a classic view of deficit spending. However, above all, Roosevelt was a pragmatist and not an ideologue. Faced with the Great Depression that was not getting much better, Roosevelt turned around, changed his mind and policy about deficits and embarked on the “pump priming” approach of injecting substantial Federal spending into the economy and accepting the deficits in order to improve the situation which had been stagnant. FDR’s new policy staved off total disaster, but few remember that his great success was a total reversal of his earlier views.
In the midst of the depression:
At the time, the George W. Bush Administration policy was to have the United States running a very large trade and budget deficit—the largest in the history of the world. In order to finance the deficit, the U. S. Government had to borrow money and it did so by selling bonds and other financial instruments. Many of these were purchased by Asians, but Paul’s point was that they were “propping up” American spending habits and might not continue to do so.
This is the kind of advice that Presidents have given the Congress for years. What makes this quotation noteworthy is the person who made the statement, President George W. Bush. It was made in the 7th year of his Presidency which had in those 7 years, at his urging, gone from a balanced budget and a national surplus projected, to the largest deficit of any nation in history and a projected deficit that even dwarfed that. So the irony of the quotation was that the politician who produced the largest economic burden on future generations was lecturing other politicians on the evils of doing exactly what he himself had been doing. Bush, if nothing else, was one of the most audacious politicians in this respect, though his most severe detractors claim that he did not have the intellectual perspective to even understand the hypocrisy of his quotation,
