Jacob J. Lew Quotes

Social Security is legally prohibited from contributing to the deficit. It cannot use debt to pay out benefits.

There is a need for Social Security reform to ensure its stability, and Congress must act.

We do ourselves a disservice when some of us cave to the myth that Social Security somehow drives the deficit.

I do not believe that the Social Security system is in crisis.

The reason to deal with Social Security is that it is a system where we have a tradition and history of making sure it is solidly funded for 75 years. At the moment, we look out and we see it is solidly funded until 2037.

The President has no real plan to address the fiscal challenges arising from the retirement of the baby boom generation, let alone a plan to fix Social Security.

We have a serious structural deficit problem. And it needs to be addressed. The president is trying to address it through reforms of Social Security, but the problem is there with other entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

It certainly would be helpful going forward for deficit reduction efforts to focus on the medium term while not subtracting from the impetus we need to keep a fragile economy moving forward.

Yes, we can pay the interest on the debt. We can renew the $500 billion worth of bonds that are coming due. We can mail out our Social Security checks. We can make sure those Medicare claims are honored. We can pay our military. We can protect our veterans. But when you get beyond that, the soup gets a little thin.

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.

I think we'll build a consensus for action on Social Security reform which will reduce that long-term unfunded obligation and put the system on a sustainable basis.

You don't lock into a ten-year family budget. You take it a year at a time - maybe even six months at a time. And then if the income really comes in the way you hope it does, then you can make some of those expenditures that you've been waiting to make. We think that same principle should apply to the national family we call America.

The real sin with Social Security is that it's a long-term rip-off and a short-term scam.

The Missourians I hear from just don't buy the idea that the only way to tackle the national debt is to drastically alter Medicare and Social Security.

I do not believe that the Social Security system is in crisis. The Social Security Administration itself recently reported that the system is able to pay full benefits as they are defined today until at least 2042.

Social Security is something that we need to deal with, because people who are working today, who will retire in the future, people who are retired today, they have a right - and it's part of the compact that they can depend on their benefits. We should fix the long-term funding problem of Social Security because that's the right thing to do.

Why does Medicare have such difficulty accommodating a cut - no, wait, a trim to its annual spending increase - of two measly percentage points? Two words: baby boom.

It's not 2038 that Social Security is bankrupt. It's now.

According to the Social Security Administration, in 1945, 41.9 workers supported each individual retiree, while today only 3.3 workers support each retiree. This system cannot continue.

Social Security's future has gotten worse, and each year we delay reform adds to the cost we are pushing off onto our children.

Economy is the method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow.

The President and I agree that Social Security needs to be preserved so that we can ensure that all Americans receive the retirement benefits they've been promised. But we disagree as to how best to fix the system.

Deficit reduction is not an end in itself. It is the means to an end. Canadians must now decide what kind of country they want to build with the hard-won dividend.