Political Quotes

“on Monday I spoke to the Senate at some length describing the economic policies of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations which were directed to the problems associated with persistent budget surpluses. It will no doubt surprise many persons now proposing to amend the Constitution so as to deal with the problem of persistent budget deficits to learn that only a few decades ago our tendencies appeared to be just the opposite of those of the last decade or so. On Monday, I spoke to the long tradition that democracies were inherently disposed to vote themselves largess, a majority would abuse its responsibilities in one way or the other. But, in fact, two centuries of the American experience has not produced that, save for this particular time. It happened that, this morning, our hugely gifted Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Robert Rubin, came before the Finance Committee with the President's budget and he showed the effect of the deficit reduction program which we put in place in this floor in moments of high drama in July, 1993, when we provided $500 billion in deficit reductions which, in turn, brought about a lowering of the deficit premium that had been riding on top of interest rates, such that in the end we had a cumulative effect of about $625 billion in deficit reduction.”