Stephanie Cutter Quotes
The most disappointing thing this week is that Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, because he was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. Because Paul Ryan decided to join Mitt Romney's ticket, he is completely reversed himself on some of the issues he has been very strong on, like the $716 billion in savings that are in two of his budgets.
Cutter, Stephanie. Interview by George Stephanopoulos. This Week, ABC, 12 Aug. 2012.
In 1964 the treasury secretary asked the president how to sell the proposed budget to Congress:
After many years of deficit financing, Clinton finally produced a balanced budget and together with his Secretary, of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, actually developed an economy which was producing a huge annual surplus that would soon eliminate the national debt. However, when George W. Bush replaced Clinton after two terms, Bush was unable to manage the budget any better than the other aspects of the Presidency. He cut taxes dramatically and even after it was clear that the Clinton surplus was squandered, he continued tax reductions and even increased them while increasing government spending creating the biggest government in history and went from our largest surplus to our largest deficit in his 8 years.
This quotation pithily summarizes a common problem in politics of describing budgets. In most years there has been a national inflation. If a new budget is, in actual dollars, the same as the previous years or a little more, but the increase is less than the inflation level, the agency will not be able to provide the same level of services as the previous year. Therefore services will be cut and those who are politically in favor of more money for the program legitimately describe this as a “budget cut”. Opponents of larger funding increases, also legitimately describe the funding as a “budget increase”. One side refers to what the money can buy and the other, to the absolute dollars spent. This is an example of the classical ambiguity of political oratory.
Although Reagan vetoed some spending that he disapproved of, he wanted so much spending on his favorite programs that he not only never brought the budget under control but his spending created the largest deficit in American history -- until George W. Bush squandered the Clinton surplus and exceeded Regan’s spending greatly and left President Obama with the greatest budget deficit in world history and a collapsing economy. Ironically, despite the fact that Reagan ran up huge deficits for the time, he always verbally advocated balanced budgets and many people in the country were persuaded by Reagan of the importance of balanced budgets. It was President Clinton who balanced the budget and eliminated the Reagan deficits.
Perry was one of a number of politicians who became opposed to deficit spending, and claimed that the public was not interested in the various projects. However, whenever any of these politicians proposed projects or programs to cut, there would be many citizens who would object vehemently. It was precicely because there was a constituency supporting all the government programs that politicians found it so hard to keep spending under control. Indeed, when others suggested terminating spending on programs and projects Perry liked, he objected as strenuously as most others.
1st Viscount Snowden
Stephanie Cutter is an American political consultant. She served as an advisor to President Barack Obama during his first presidential term, and was deputy campaign manager for his 2012 re-election campaign. She previously worked in campaign and communications roles for other prominent Democrats including Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Michelle Obama. The New York Times described her as "a popular but polarizing face of (Obama's) campaign", and a "soldier who says the things the candidate can’t (or won’t) say."
