Political Quotes

“After a very great deal of effort and not inconsiderable amount of pain, we have brought the Federal budget into balance. I stood here in 1993, or rather my good friend, now Ambassador to China, Mr. Sasser, as chairman of the Budget Committee, stood here and I stood there as chairman of the Finance Committee, and in a very close and dramatic moment, we got the required 51 votes to enact what I have since acknowledged to be the largest tax increase in history. But it broke the back of the expectation that we could never handle our finances, that interest rates had to be high, the inflation premium attendant on the probability that we would end up monetizing the debt because we couldn't pay for it. We did it, and the deficit has gone down. We have this most extraordinary, unprecedented, somewhat difficult-to-comprehend situation of full employment, low inflation, low interest rates, high productivity. Fuller employment than we ever thought was compatible with the interest situation. We are in a new economic setting, and by March, I would think, the continued revenues to the Treasury would be such that the deficit will have disappeared.”