Quotes about Fiscal Deficits

Keith Ellison

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

Mike Harcourt

Deficits of that size are foreign to my thinking.

Mike Pence

All we're getting from the Democratic majority in Congress and from this White House is more bailouts, more spending, more planned stimulus, more deficits and debt, and the American people have had it.

Henry Paulson

The most pressing and significant problems in the global economy are unsustainable structural issues with regard to the E.U. - fiscal deficits and the structure of the E.U. itself.

Alan Patricof

In times of huge fiscal deficits, no new revenues can be ignored, and renouncing any becomes well nigh politically impossible.

Vinod Khosla

I'm a fiscal hawk. I vote against all taxes, but I do believe the environment, and climate change, is a bigger issue than fiscal deficits are as a risk to the nation.

Dick Cheney

I worry that we're seeing a situation- Obama's administration not only committing us the huge deficits for the future, but is also redefining the relationship between government, on the one hand, and the private sector on the other.

James Surowiecki

Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.

Ron Paul

A paper monetary standard means there are no restraints on the printing press or on federal deficits.

There actually are restraints on how much paper money a government will issue, but unlike with a gold standard where the restraint is external and controlled by how much gold the country can amass. However, with paper money the restraints area all internal. If too much money is printed, the value of the money relative to gold, silver and other nation’s money will go down and imports will become more expensive. Excessive printing of money can easily produce inflation. However, the internal restraints can be overcome by the government’s need to raise money for war, debt or other purposes. So Paul and many other politicians have a deep distrust of paper money not backed by Gold or Silver. In the United States however, the Government does not control the money supply or the printing policies of money. This is under the control of the Federal Reserve Board which while appointed by President’s as terms expire, have a great deal of independence both from the Executive and Legislative Branches. For that reason Paul is even more distrustful when the Federal Reserve decides to print money. See {629491} for his unsuccessful effort to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank.

Jeffrey Sachs

I think the IMF helped to detonate the Indonesian crisis.

Jean Chretien

Taken to its logical extreme, the Laffer curve makes no sense because, if you lower your taxes to zero, how are you going to get higher revenues? In practice, every government that toyed with this theory ended up with larger deficits, higher interest rates and greater social inequality.

The Laffer curve was a mathematical, economic curve supposedly showing the relationship between tax rate and government revenue from taxes. In Laffer’s version of this curve, as interest rates go down, revenue from taxes goes UP because according to Laffer, there will be much more economic activity if taxes are lowered. In reality this has happened rarely in certain countries and in a very narrow range of tax deduction. As Chretien observes if you lower the tax rate to zero according to the Laffer curve this should maximize revenue but obviously it does not because with a zero rate there are no taxes collected even if the economy is booming. The Laffer curve was ideologically popular with those politicians wanting to lower taxes, but it never stood up to serious analysis and never worked in practice as Chretien observes. As a result, some people refer to the curve as the Laughter curve.

Fiscal Deficits Quotes