Steven Rattner Quotes

Not in the constitution, but I would propose a law to the French parliament that provides for reducing the budget deficit year by year, until we have reached a balanced budget by 2017.

The Tea Party knows that continuing to delay charting a course to spending reform hurts everybody.

We have to reduce the burden placed on our economy by years of deficits and debt.

Without deficit reduction, we cannot have sustained economic growth.

Only one thing can save this country, and that's to get a handle on this deficit and debt issue.

While President Obama shirks his responsibility to advance solutions to our fiscal challenges, he can no longer hide from the merciless math of the balance sheet. Conservatives have made certain of that.

As the President reviewed the state of the union and unveiled his second-term agenda, he fell short of adequately explaining how he intends to set America back on the course of fiscal responsibility and secure the fiscal health of the nation.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.

In fact, I think - our view of this is that while the agreement, the compromise did not achieve the kind of super-sized deficit reduction that we sought, it did end the uncertainty around the perception, the possibility that the United States might default on its obligations for its first time. That was a good thing.

I will work to restore fiscal responsibility to our country's budget and to provide for a more robust economy.

But the debt limit obviously is something that needs to and will be passed. That is not inconsistent with a process and a belief that we have to get significant deficit reduction.

I think achieving a higher fiscal stability is also a very important condition for restoring an environment which is conducive to growth.

We agree with Simpson and Bowles and others who have looked at this. What's necessary is to stabilize the debt and then work from there. You can't balance the budget in the short term because to do that would be to ratchet down the economy.

If we didn't propose these reforms, we would not have proposed a budget that got the debt under control.

We're committed to working with Congress to doing what the president said he was always going to do, which is cut the deficit in half over the - over his first term.

While there are no easy solutions to this problem, the Deficit Reduction Act gets us started in the right direction by beginning with the most obvious, commonsense reforms to save taxpayer dollars.

We had a $10 billion budget deficit when we got here in January of 2003. We cut that budget deficit; we did not raise taxes; we came back in '05, and we had an $8 billion surplus. That's how fast it can happen.

The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.

Every day things get better because politicians are addressing the fiscal challenges more aggressively.

Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit, once so incomprehensibly large that it had eleven zeroes, will be, simply zero.

Tonight I come before you to announce that the Federal Deficit will be simply zero.

We give lip service to the importance of deficit reduction, but Americans oppose every single thing that you might do to reduce the deficit.

The first order of business is the elimination of the annual deficit.

Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.

I believe, as a matter of principle, that the debt is a problem that must be addressed sooner rather than later. I also know that fundamental changes are needed in the way Washington spends and taxes if we truly want a healthy economy. This must include changing our government's long-term fiscal path, which is unsustainable.