Jay Carney Quotes

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.

We've not had one Republican president in 34 years balance the budget. You can't trust right-wing Republicans with your money. You ought to hire somebody who has balanced a budget. I'm much more conservative with money than George Bush is.

You know, we've got to be responsible about our debt. We don't want the United States to ever be a dead beat, and not be able to pay its bills, either to our soldiers who are fighting or to Social Security recipients.

Not raising the debt ceiling does not trigger a default, because we've got enough money to service our debts. Default is when you can't service your debt.

The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.

Bush has never sent over a balanced budget.

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 we had decided on January 5, in the new House of Representatives, to make no new spending bills, the debt ceiling would've still been hit, because, those are bills that are coming in as a result of purchases and commitments made by the administration and the previous Congress.

Our system of keeping the federal government's books is a monument to the creativity of mankind ... We've cut government spending for 15 years in a row, and yet have spent more money in each of those years.

I do not pretend to step out of my own sphere and to control the internal management of other departments, but it seems to me that as Secretary of the Treasury, I may ask, that, while peace continues, the aggregate of the expenditure of those departments be kept within bounds such as will preserve the equilibrium between the national revenue and expenditure without recurrence to loans.

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

I can tell you if you look at the polls, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, they do not think we should increase the debt limit.

All the states are required, either by constitution or by statute, to have balanced budgets - they're not able to print money. So they have to focus on establishing priorities.

The U.S. has a law on the books called the debt limit, but the name is misleading. The debt limit started in 1917 for the purpose of facilitating more national debt, not reducing it. It still serves that purpose. It's unconnected to spending, hurts our credit rating and has been an abject failure at limiting debt.

In coming to the Congress as a new Member and becoming a fellow Blue Dog, we have had an opportunity to share and really spend a great deal of time in examining the challenges that our Nation finds itself in in getting its fiscal house in order.

Sequestration was not designed to be anyone's ideal method for getting our hands around government spending, and it certainly isn't mine.

I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.

To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.

Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.

Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.

As a fiscal conservative, I believe one of the most important roles the federal government can play in assuring that our economy remains strong is to keep our fiscal house in order.

Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well.

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

We have a spending problem, not a taxing problem. The less we spend, the more jobs we have the potential to create.

There are no uncontrollable outlays except for debt interest. Outlays are what they are due to legislation.