Politics & Power Quote by Jim Cooper

"First, the year 2004, the year past, the Comptroller General of the United States, David A. Walker, said that arguably it was the worst year in American fiscal history, clearly setting our Nation on an unsustainable path"

Jim Cooper, Politician

About this Quote

Calling 2004 "arguably... the worst year in American fiscal history" is less a statistic than a siren. Jim Cooper isn’t trying to win an argument on the merits of one budget line; he’s trying to make complacency feel reckless. The sentence is built like an indictment: a date stamp ("First, the year 2004"), an appeal to unimpeachable authority (the Comptroller General), then the loaded verdict ("worst") and the ominous consequence ("unsustainable path"). It’s courtroom rhetoric disguised as bookkeeping.

The specific intent is to elevate fiscal policy from partisan squabble to national emergency. By outsourcing the harshest judgment to David Walker, Cooper shields himself from the easy counterattack that he’s just scoring points. "Arguably" is doing strategic work too: it signals fairness while still letting the phrase "worst year" land with maximum force. The word "clearly" then snaps the door shut again, reasserting certainty right after hedging.

Subtext: 2004 wasn’t merely a bad year; it was a turning point, a moment when routine political choices hardened into structural damage. In context, this is the mid-2000s cocktail of tax cuts, war spending, and a growing disconnect between promises and revenues. Cooper is framing fiscal irresponsibility as a moral failing of governance - not just red ink, but a betrayal of future citizens who inherit the bill. The line aims to make the abstract (debt trajectories) feel like history being miswritten in real time.

Quote Details

Topic	Money
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Jim Add to List

About the Author

Jim Cooper (born June 19, 1954) is a Politician from USA.

17 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"I don't want to remember 2005 as a year that the government heaped unnecessary burdens upon American families. Stealing from the poor and middle class and giving to the rich, while increasing the deficit, is hardly responsible"

Marty Meehan, Politician

"Sadly, the President's budget proposal for the upcoming year once again puts cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans over addressing our country's severe fiscal problems"

Carl Levin, Politician

"The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it"

Daniel Keys Moran, Writer

Daniel Keys Moran

"The first year of the Bush administration we used up all of the surplus and ended up just with the Social Security and Medicare surplus, and each year worse than the year before"

Bobby Scott, Politician

"The deficit - the U.S. knows our deficit is too large. We are committed to bringing it down. We are bringing it down. The deficit came in for fiscal year '05 at considerably below where it was the prior year"

John W. Snow, Economist

"The outlook for the Federal budget is bleak"

Doug Elmendorf, Economist

"We campaigned on the fact that we were going to have to take difficult decisions because of the state of the public finances. When we got into government we discovered that actually the public finances were in an even worse state than we thought"

Theresa May, Politician

"The worst excesses of the Congress of the 1980s pale in comparison with what is going on in Washington today"

Marty Meehan, Politician

"Our tax policies, the tax relief and reform we passed in 2003 and 2005, helped get government out of the way of America's entrepreneurs, and our unemployment rate is now lower than it was in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s"

Marsha Blackburn, Politician

"The worst is still ahead of us. But no one in Washington has the spine to tell you that"

Glenn Beck, Journalist

"The financial report makes it very clear that if we got into honest budgeting today, that in fact we would find ourselves with a much larger deficit than we have today"

Jim Costa, Politician

"The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression"

Jay Carney, Public Servant

"I think that, you know, this is a different year than most years. We've got to tell the American people that we have to live with less. We have a $13.5 trillion debt. And the only way to do that is an honest campaign with honest people"

Ken Buck, Politician

"In 2001, Congress passed much needed tax relief to allow Americans to keep more of their hard earned money and spend it as they see fit - rather than how the federal government sees fit"

Doc Hastings, Politician

"We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises"

Lawrence Summers, Economist

"Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy"

Chris Chocola, Politician

"Of course, tax revenues have ended up being substantially higher than they were at the time these dire projections were made, and we are very close now to having a balanced budget. All that has been very helpful"

Charles Vest, Educator

"We're on the verge of a financial collapse unless we balance the budget, and that means some really, really tough decisions"

Gary Johnson

"The President is destroying the fabric of America with a combined policy of war, tax cuts for the wealthy, and reductions in spending for domestic needs"

Charles Rangel, Politician

"The truth is the Republican leadership has created a credit card Congress that is recklessly selling out the future of America, our children and our grandchildren, and President Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible President in the history of America"

Dennis Cardoza, Politician