Paul Ryan Quotes

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

There is a very serious fiscal-policy question of, 'Are we running our overall fiscal policy such that we as a government can pay our bills?'

If you ask the question of Americans, should we pay our bills? One hundred percent would say yes. There's a significant misunderstanding on the debt ceiling. People think it's authorizing new spending. The debt ceiling doesn't authorize new spending; it allows us to pay obligations already incurred.

Not raising the debt ceiling is not an automatic trigger for a default.

Stay on the path that the Democratic Party has us on, we're going to be in a mountain range of debt.

I served on the budget committee in the Senate, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday when we had a hearing in which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn't really need to pay down the debt - outrageous in my view.

President Obama flew to a rally in Las Vegas last night. However, he did not visit any of the casinos. You know why? When you're $16 trillion in debt, they don't let you in.

We have, during his regime, during President Obama's regime, we've doubled our national debt. We're up to $20 trillion.

[D]ebt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

In time of peace there can, at all events, be no justification for the creation of a permanent debt by the Federal Government. Its limited range of constitutional duties may certainly under such circumstances be performed without such a resort.

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.

When George W. Bush entered office, the national debt was $5 trillion. When he left, it was $10 trillion. I think the administration spent too much money.

Raising the debt ceiling is not additional spending. It is simply saying, you, the United States of America, can continue to borrow the money you need to pay the bills you have already rung up.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy.

For the last 4 years, our Federal Government has produced the four biggest deficits in history, and the estimated 2006 deficit of $423 billion is projected to be the largest of all.

When President Obama was in the Senate, when he was a U.S. senator, he voted against raising the debt ceiling. And he said it was a lack of leadership that had brought us to this point.

The debt ceiling serves no useful purpose.

I don't see why anybody's playing chicken with the debt ceiling.

The debt ceiling is not something to toy with.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us with $19 trillion in debt.

We have to deal with the nation's debt.

I'm not going to raise the debt ceiling.

If we reach the debt ceiling, we don't have to default. Getting to that point just won't allow us to reach new debt.

The president says we need to raise the debt ceiling because America pays its bills. No if we paid our bills we wouldn't have all this debt. The reason we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we can't pay our bills and we have to borrow money because we don't have any money to pay our bills.