Alan Greenspan Quotes

We have to deal with the nation's debt.

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

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.

I think at the end of the day we have to raise the debt ceiling, because America pays its bills.

It is simply science fiction fantasy to say that, if you do not raise the debt ceiling, that everything is going to collapse.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

To date, every American citizen has nearly $27,000 in public debt riding on our backs.

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

The debt ceiling serves no useful purpose.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us with $19 trillion in debt.

Not raising the debt ceiling is not an automatic trigger for a default.

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.

We should, as a country, be very concerned about our borrowing cost.

It took the first 204 years of our Nation's history to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. And now we are doing that every 2 or 3 years.

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

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

What our Republican friends are doing, if we look at what they do and not what they say, they have decided that the most important thing in this country is to increase payments for interest on the national debt.

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

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.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

Have you noticed the debt is exploding? And it's not all because of Medicare.

It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy.

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.

The debt ceiling at some point has to be raised. I don't think there's anybody that questions the fact that if we ended up getting in a situation where the U.S. government was sending out IOUs like the state of California did at one point, that ends up creating quite a brand problem for our country.