Gina Raimondo Quotes

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

I've been Secretary of the Treasury for 147 days, and in that 147 days I've written $133 billion worth of hot checks.

Now, people when I say that look at me and say, 'What are you talking about, Joe? You're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?'. The answer is yes, that's what I'm telling you.

Veterans are driven by the same frustrations that the public has with what is happening in Washington... the fiscal irresponsibility and the financial crisis that our country is facing.

In the United States we have the great Harvard Business School, but America is the country with the greatest debt in the world.

But if they want to really think about the fiscal future of this country, then think about how we have moved from hundreds of billions of surpluses to hundreds of billions of deficits.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

Our national finances are in a ruinous state.

I have now the Treasurer’s head in a bag.

Can there be a more lamentable picture than that of a Chancellor of the Exchequer seated on an empty chest by a pool of bottomless deficiency fishing for a budget?

We need to resist the temptation to create more entitlements and more entitlements, which is one of the reasons we are heading recklessly toward fiscal crisis.

Instead of more talk about salmon and high-speed rails, more criticism of the Supreme Court or more praise for the Soviet's Sputnik mission - President Obama should use his State of the Union Address to tell the American people the truth about the fundamental financial challenges our country faces.

This deficit that we have threatens our very way of life, and everything needs to be on the table.

This country right now owes $19 trillion. And they need somebody like me to straighten out that mess.

Most of the major increases in the debt ceiling have been accompanied by structural changes in the way we raise and spend money.

You know, we have a fiscal train wreck before us. And unless we act, and act deliberately, we're not going to enable our kids to have what we have. It's plain and simple as that.

We are spending a little more than we are raising each year and you wonder how long it can go on. It is too easy for us to borrow.

We cannot continue our leadership in the world as the largest debtor nation the world has ever known.

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

Any government, like individuals and families, cannot spend more than they take in without courting disaster.

The best deficit reduction program is a growing economy.

You spend a billion here and a billion there. Sooner of later it adds up to real money.

We've got the budget deficit and we've got the human deficit.

Our ordinary income is barely at a par with our ordinary expenditures and new taxes must be ready.

The only way to meet the situation [the financial crisis] is spend less money and to run the City of New York within the limits of our resources. Unless you do this, gentlemen, you will have a difficult problem confronting you by the end of this year and the taxpayers of 1922 and the years thereafter will have to pay the price of our present lack of prudence or our unwillingness to economize at the proper time.