Jacob J. Lew Quotes

But the debt limit obviously is something that needs to and will be passed. That is not inconsistent with a process and a belief that we have to get significant deficit reduction.

I'm not going to raise the debt ceiling.

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.

The American people reject the idea of giving Washington a blank check to increase the debt limit.

The American people know that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

No one in the modern history of this country, no president, has done more to move toward a balanced budget than has President Bill Clinton.

Cutting budget deficits can never be just an exercise in economics.

In a clean break from the Obama years, and frankly from the years before this president, we will keep federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, or less. That is enough. The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth, or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government.

States, virtually all of them, have a constitutional requirement to operate on a balanced budget.

I am a deficit hawk.

There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.

Like Ike [President Eisenhower] did. Talk economy and then spend away.

You cannot borrow and spend your way into prosperity. It does not work.

We are the ones that are trying to get Washington spending under control so it can live within its means.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses.

I am a fiscal conservative.

But I think the global economy will understand that the United States has the ability to meet its obligations. But it's not going to be able to do it over the long term if we can't control the growth of government.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

I look at this in a very simple way: I want to bring the debt down.

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

I was the chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the chief architects the last time we balanced a budget, and it was the first time we had done it since man walked on the moon. We had a $5 trillion surplus and we cut taxes.

The American people are tired of the out-of-control spending, and they want Washington to get their act in order and stop spending money we don't have.

If it took multiple debt ceiling hikes, I'd rather achieve the savings.

Today is the day for the complaining to end and for statesmanship to begin. Today I am taking action to cut state spending and balance the budget this year.

It is time we passed a balanced budget amendment and return this government to limited spending.