Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

The real number of the US' obligations, unfunded obligations that we're passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion. The vast majority of that is health entitlements - Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There's also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.

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 money the president wants to borrow for Iraq will come directly out of the American taxpayer wallets in the form of Medicare and Social Security receipts. That's your money.

Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?

I know that my Republican colleagues are as ashamed as I am that the United States is forced to borrow over $1 trillion from foreign nations to pay for our national priorities like reconstruction of the gulf coast and the war in Iraq.

We have sent our troops to war without paying for it. Now, we are bringing them home without saying how we are paying for it.

The country is facing a fiscal crisis, and the United States Senate is at the center of the debate about how to bring federal spending under control.

Social Security has not contributed to the deficit problem.

In the current law we're seeing Social Security dwindle. And so what we're saying is if we're going to reduce taxes we just want to make sure that there are things within the law that pay for it.

We know that Medicare's going broke in seven years, but we need to start over. That's what the American people want us to do.

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan get elected to the White House, Medicare will be bankrupt by the end of their first term.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

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

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.

We are not going to let Donald Trump bankrupt America the way he bankrupted his casinos.

The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.

We can meet the obligations of Social security and Medicare. If we stay on the path that your party has us on, we'll be in a mountain range of debt and we're gonna face hard choices.

The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion-dollar deficit. ... This notion that somehow we caused the deficits is just wrong. It's just not true. ... If they start trying to give you a bunch of facts and figures suggesting that it's true, what they're not telling you is they baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts and a prescription drug plan that they didn't pay for and the wars.

I find it scandalous not only that there was so little discussion of the costs of the Iraq war before we went to war - this was, after all, a war of choice - but even five years into the war, the Administration has not provided a comprehensive accounting of the war.

We have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece.

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the "mounting" deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches.

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

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.