For the past two years a number of Washington politicians have been insisting that a cut, to be a cut, must be a decrease in spending, not a decrease in the increase in spending. That such a semantic argument should even be necessary is a measure of just how deeply the culture of spending had become ingrained in Washington. That it has met with only limited success is a measure of just how powerful are the forces behind continued deficit spending. John Steele Gordon
In Hamilton’s Blessing, as quoted in Forbes, June 2, 1997