Robert Hormats Quotes

... the Social Security trust fund is not spare money; it is spoken for.

Social Security is on the books. We’ll pay for it as long as we have money or can borrow it.

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

Entitlement programs are on autopilot. I’m alarmed. We’re close to the danger zone.

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

What should we do with this projected surplus? I have a simple four-word answer: Save Social Security first.

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

I know that plenty of folks have issues with Social Security, but I'd urge them to confront it on its own terms. Calling it a Ponzi scheme is misleading and does more to cloud the issue than it does to illuminate it. And yes, I do know that unless changes are made, the current system is unsustainable. But that doesn't mean it's fraud.

Social Security has not contributed to the deficit problem.

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.

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.

While the feds … leave Social Security off their books, the government's obligation to make benefit payments to current and near-term Social Security recipients is certainly no less real than its obligation to pay interest on its Treasury bonds.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

When the greatest part of the [U.S.] budget pays for our defense and the livelihood of retirees, it is pointless to pretend that public spending is an embarrassment consisting only of welfare and waste.

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.

Social Security works better than any other program in the world. Why dismantle it now?

We want the benefits of government services ranging from security in our old age to the best national defense possible, but we scream when the bill for these services comes due in the form of higher taxes.

To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

The real Social Security crisis is that the government does not have the money to redeem its IOUs.

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.

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.

Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

No one was elected to Congress because he or she promised to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

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.