James Surowiecki Quotes

The debt ceiling serves no useful purpose.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

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.

The Beltway is waking up to the realities of Prsident Obam's budget plan, which taxes, spends, and borrows as far as the eye can see.

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

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

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.

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.

There is a limit to how much the United States Treasury can borrow.

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.

When President Bush left office, the deficit was approximately $500 billion. It is now approximately now $1.5 trillion. In other words, President Obama has essentially tripled the deficit.

The debt ceiling is not something to toy with.

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

The biggest reason we know Justin Trudeau will raise taxes is because his never-ending deficits will force him to.

The president says we need to raise the debt ceiling because America pays its bills. No if we paid our bills we wouldn't have all this debt. The reason we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we can't pay our bills and we have to borrow money because we don't have any money to pay our bills.

It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

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 debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

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

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.