Kent Conrad Quotes

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.

Social Security is on the books. We’ll pay for it as long as we have money or can borrow it.

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

I think we will begin to see some real efforts made to do things like protecting Social Security and Medicare.

Because Social Security has not contributed to our debt, Americans should be skeptical of any politician who says that benefits Americans have earned must be reduced in order to address our national debt.

We should stop having a conversation about cutting Social Security a little bit or a lot.

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

What Donald Trump is proposing with these massive tax cuts will result in a $20 trillion additional national debt. That will have dire consequences for Social Security and Medicare.

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.

We can have tax cuts, but when we have tax cuts and do not have a surplus, the amount of the tax cut goes straight to the bottom line, adds to the deficit, and the deficit adds to the national debt, and sooner or later, the debt has to be paid.

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

You cannot tackle Britain's debts without tackling the unreformed welfare system.

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

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

Social Security represents an $11 trillion unfunded obligation. And when I say unfunded obligation, I mean we have to come up with $11 trillion at some point to make the system whole.

If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.

I am not wrong in the belief that its public funds are more secure than those of all the European powers.

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.

As a matter of fact, if you do not take into account, as Congressman Ross just stated, the Social Security surplus, our fiscal deficit, ladies and gentlemen, is over $700 billion today.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

All the Social Security Trust Fund Money Is Gone!

May the debt of the United States be discharged with speed and punctuality; and let not the people be deceived, by having the funds, established for that purpose, put to other uses.

Unless we get entitlement costs under control, Social Security will inevitably square off against national security.

To deal with entitlements we must either raise taxes, cut benefits, or borrow inordinate amounts of money.

We must unequivocally reject any cuts to Social Security or Medicare benefits.