Ted Deutch Quotes

Social Security has not contributed to the deficit problem.

A Congressional Budget Office report released as recent as June 2004 says the system will be able to pay full benefits until 2052, and 80 percent after that.

Will some reporter, or some Republican on the Sunday shows, please ask why tax cuts raid the non-existent Social Security Trust Fund but all the Democrats' new spending doesn't? Will someone please ask that?

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

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.

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.

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.

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.

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

If the economy is strained, then Social Security, like the rest of the government, will be, too.

I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

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.

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.

It's not easy cutting welfare bills. It's not easy cutting the deficit.

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

All the Social Security Trust Fund Money Is Gone!

The payment of Social Security benefits under law have little or nothing to do with the fiscal resources available.

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

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

The revenue stream for Social Security benefits comes from payroll taxes, which are credited to the Social Security Trust Fund - accounting for the program's finances separately from the rest of the budget.

The way to reduce the deficit is to create jobs and work opportunities so that people will have money with which to pay taxes.

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.

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

And in terms of entitlement reforms, we have to save them from themselves, because if we don't reform social security and we don't reform Medicare, they're going to actually implode.