Ronald Reagan Budget Quotes & Sayings

His presidency ended more than a decade ago, but politicians, Democrat and Republican, still talk about Ronald Reagan. Al Gore has an ad noting that in Congress he opposed the Reagan budget cuts. He says that because Bill Bradley was one of 36 Democratic Senators who voted for the cuts. Gore doesn't point out that Bradley also voted against the popular Reagan tax cuts and that it was the tax cuts that piled up those enormous deficits, a snowballing national debt. — Bruce Morton

The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern. — Ronald Reagan

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other; it is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, as long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget - just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. In short, the paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. — Ronald Reagan

I learned everything I ever need to know about questioning artful dodgers by covering the most artful of them all, Ronald Reagan. For Reagan, performance was as much a part of governing as understanding the details of the federal budget. — Andrea Mitchell

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule. — Ronald Reagan

Conservatives were brought up to hate deficits and justifiably so. We've long thought there are two things in Washington that are unbalanced - the budget and the liberals. — Ronald Reagan

I don't think we'll solve the problem of the deficit until three things happen: We need more discipline on spending in Congress. We need a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget. And we need to give our presidents a line-item veto. — Ronald Reagan

Balancing your budget is like protecting your virtue. You have to learn when to say no. — Ronald Reagan

If there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy's budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn't spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers' expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn't be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before. — Ronald Reagan

Were not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the states and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government. — Ronald Reagan

The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy. If the people running the welfare program had let their clientele find other ways of making a living, that would have reduced their importance and their budget. — Ronald Reagan

Yes, the deficit doctors have their scalpels out all right, but they're not poised over the budget. That's as fat as ever and getting fatter. What they're ready to operate on is your wallet. — Ronald Reagan