Fiscal Imbalance Quotes

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale

Social Security is stealing—from those who earned the money to others who didn’t.

Well, a deficit reflects an imbalance between spending and revenue, and so narrowing it requires acting on one, the other or both.

Honest people can disagree on policy. But where there can be no honest disagreement is the need to change our nation's debt course.

Madame Deficit

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.

Republicans profess to be against deficits, but they are experts at creating and exacerbating deficits.

Now we are raising the debt limit 3 times, up to $8 trillion, so that our children and our grandchildren will have to pay for the cost of our expenditures.

The liberal fiscal spending of the 2004-08 period was made possible both by rising government revenues and national income growth and by relative comfort on the external side. After 2009, these pillars of growth began to wobble. By 2012, they were shaking.

The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect.

The Treasury was suffering under every kind of embarrassment. The demands upon it were great in amount, while the means for satisfying them were comparatively small, precarious in collection and difficult in their application.

Washington is a place where politics and economics often aren't on speaking terms.

As austerity measures were foisted upon Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and other highly indebted countries, growth was rendered even more elusive, aggravating unemployment

There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries.

This country doesn't have a revenue problem - it has a spending problem.

The debt and the deficit is just getting out of control, and the administration is still pumping through billions upon trillions of new spending. That does not grow the economy.

The Bush Administration claims there is a Social Security crisis only to distract Americans from its serious mismanagement of the federal budget.

For years governments have been promising more than they can deliver, and delivering more than they can afford.

I think the government lost control over fiscal policy in UPA-2. But it is possible to suggest that the momentum of the populism of UPA-1 did the damage when the economy slowed down, but government spending could not.

The political and social costs of adjusting to a common currency … have fallen disproportionately on the poor and the powerless. Over the past 2 years, the EU has called for cuts in the minimum wage and government spending, but it has asked less of wealthy citizens, bankers, and the citizens of surplus countries.

If we enact laws that will produce very large budget deficits and we are not able to rein them in, it will do grave damage and destabilize the economy.

In both the U.S. and Europe, the budget and balance sheet numbers do not work. When 'off-balance sheet' promises are taken into account, the U.S. and most countries of the Euro zone are insolvent.

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

Bush may be a strong leader in the war on terrorism, but on budget deficits he is missing-in-action.

You don't have to look any farther than the state of California to know that having a 'Gordian knot' of conflicting measures acting upon on your state budget is a recipe for disaster.