As a Main Street businessman, I believe we need to reduce runaway federal spending and address our national debt and the MAP Act provides Congress with the tools to accomplish this goal.
So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor.
Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.
The best deficit reduction program is a growing economy.
Budgets that don't balance, public programs that aren't funded, pension funds that are running out of money, schools that aren't funded - How does that help anyone?
There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.
Someone has to stay on the line and say, no, we can do this by cutting spending and reducing the size of government. That's what I was committed to doing.
If the fiscal cliff occurs, I don't think the Federal Reserve has the tools to offset that event.
What's hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can't even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic - it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.
I believe that government is too large, costs too much, spends too much, and has too much regulatory power in our lives.
I just believe that government borrowing and spending doesn't lead to economic prosperity, growth, or sustainable jobs. I know that it comes from the private sector: people who invest in their businesses and ideas.
The average standard of living of the average American is going to go down. That is the only way we can cope with our debt and trade deficit problems.
Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.
Every dollar the government doesn't spend, tax, or borrow is a dollar that businesses and families can spend or invest themselves.
Today it is evident that we have two political parties: the Tax and Spenders and the No-Tax and Spenders. Neither party is fiscally conservative. Is there no room at the inn for an honest conservative? A conservative who makes the case for smaller government on its merits and not just as the fallback option when fiscal bankruptcy threatens?
'Hello my name is the Republican Party and I got a problem. I'm addicted to spending and big government.' I'd like one of them just to stand up and say that.
Part of any solution to get our economy going should include steps to free up our small businesses by peeling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations, ending the continual threats of tax hikes, and addressing the cloud of federal debt that hangs over our economy.
Nobody ever rioted for austerity.
After almost 50 years in which federal spending averaged about 20 percent of GDP, Joe Sestak and Nancy Pelosi took federal spending to 25 percent. You know, that's a 25 percent increase in the size of the government overnight. That's what we - that's what we've got to rein in.
If the small government concept grows, we have fewer dollars leaving our pockets, we have more folks motivated to make a profit.
The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.
Now, let me be clear. The path I lay out is not one paved with ever increasing government checks and cradle to grave assurance that government will always be the solution. If this election is a bidding war for who can promise the most goodies and the most benefits, I'm not your president. You have that president today.
We're on the verge of a financial collapse unless we balance the budget, and that means some really, really tough decisions.
Ever since the economic crisis in 2008, millions of people have accepted cuts in all sorts of things - from real wages and living standards to benefits and hospital care - without any real opposition. The cuts may be right, or they may be stupid - but the astonishing thing is how no-one really challenges them.
If you look at what is happening in Republican conventions across the country, they are energized. And the message is really the same - that is, big government is a problem, spending is a problem.
