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When he was the Vice president, Dick Cheney famously said: “Deficits don’t matter…”
Now he says he’s embarrassed that S&P gave us an “AA” rating (down from a triple A.)
The Huffington Post
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was “embarrassed” when the U.S. credit rating was downgraded in August, and he hopes that the development will compel lawmakers to continue to work to address the deficit.
Cheney’s comments came in an extended interview with Rush Limbaugh, published in the right-wing radio host’s print newsletter “The Limbaugh Letter.”
“Now, these last few months have been pretty messy,” said Cheney. “I think like a lot of people I was embarrassed when they lowered our credit rating from AAA to AA. I literally felt embarrassed for my country.”
“But I also think that the fact that we’ve gotten to this point where we are faced with a crisis in terms of the debt problem, that that’s going to give those of us who want to address that issue and fix it the leverage that we haven’t had up until now, in terms of insisting on the kinds of policies that will be painful, but in the long run are necessary if we’re going to restore full faith and credit in the United States government.”
The Bush administration wasn’t always so concerned with making “painful” choices to address the deficit. As a recent chart put together by The New York Times showed, Bush-era war spending and tax cuts alone contributed more to “the swing from projected surpluses to deficits” than President Obama’s policies, taken out to 2017.
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- Dick Cheney Book ‘In My Time’: The Biggest Revelations From The Vice President’s Memoir (PHOTOS) (huffingtonpost.com)
- Dick Cheney’s Memior Targets: Juiciest Jabs (abcnews.go.com)
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