Jim Ryun Quotes

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for half the Federal spending.

A budget matters to people who worry about protecting and saving critical programs like Medicare and Social Security. A budget matters to younger workers who fear that more and more money will be taken from their paychecks to fund another generation's spending spree.

55 percent of the national budget consists of entitlements. These are established by law but do not get funds appropriated annually—not part of the usual give and take of the Congress and the administration. If you meet the criteria of the law, you get the money.

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.

Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?

The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.

Spending on programs such as national defense and funding the operating budgets of all federal agencies represent only 39 percent of our yearly budget, an all-time low.

It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.

No one was elected to Congress because he or she promised to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

Our fiat currency is under increasing stress with our large and growing trade deficits. We have a federal deficit that is calculated in the trillions when we take into account the net present value of the future Social Security and Medicaid obligations we are creating today.

When you talk about entitlement programs, it's not just about - it's not about cutting those programs. It is about saving those programs. Those programs are on a path of fiscal unsustainability.

The Social Security Trust Fund should not be trusted and it is not funded.

Entitlement programs are on autopilot. I’m alarmed. We’re close to the danger zone.

Without federal assistance, most elderly Americans would be unable to afford long-term care - and most nursing homes would be unable to keep the doors open.

It is foolish for Republicans to continue opening the door to job-killing tax hikes while Democrats refuse to explain how they propose to reform mandatory spending - mostly entitlements - that makes up almost two-thirds of the federal budget.

I'd also remind people, if I were running for Presidency, that a long-term problem facing the budget is Social Security and Medicare.

There is a lot of fiscal conservatives in the United States senate that didn't vote for that because we understand that national security spending is not the reason why we have a debt. Our debt is being driven by the way Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and, by the way, the interest on the debt is structured in the years to come.

[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.

The true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo.

It is time for the general fund to pay the Social Security fund back.

The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

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

General revenue - what taxpayers are willing to give government, what they think is fair to give government - is not going to grow at the same amount that the federal government basically forces us to spend on Medicaid.

Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won't primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.