Alan Greenspan Quotes

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

I always think a debt ceiling is a good tool to carry something.

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

For the last 4 years, our Federal Government has produced the four biggest deficits in history, and the estimated 2006 deficit of $423 billion is projected to be the largest of all.

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution ... an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

The biggest enemy of the United States is not some terrorist hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility

I don't see why anybody's playing chicken with the debt ceiling.

The debt ceiling is not something to toy with.

I'm not going to raise the debt ceiling.

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

Obama did inherit a deficit when he came into office. Why this fact justifies racking up vastly more debt and bigger deficits is a logical mystery.

There are a lot of anachronisms in Washington, but the need to periodically raise the debt limit by Congressional vote is certainly one of them.

Federal spending is atrocious.

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.

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?'

We've got to start worrying about America. And if we don't start dealing with the debt we have and the deficit spending we have in Washington, politics doesn't matter, because the American people do realize that they have to balance their budgets.

As we all know, the budget decisions which give rise to increased debt are what counts, and the debt is just a by-product of those budget decisions.

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.

The national budget is perhaps the most important and least understood documents in Washington.

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

A public debt is a public curse and in a representative government greater than any other.

A national debt, properly funded and serviced, can be a potent instrument of national policy.

Someone should put up a chart for Congress showing the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. Our problems are in trillions and Congress is arguing about millions.

Defaulting on our [national] debt is defaulting on America.

Last year 100,000 people gathered on The Mall to Protest the deficit. We Republicans, over and over, castigated President Obama for creating a Trillion dollar deficit. I was against big deficits then, and I am agaist them now. Just because it is now Republicans doing all the spending, I am still opposed.... Those Republcians who voted for a tax cut and a spending increase are hypocrites.