Peter Orszag Quotes

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

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 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've got a chart here that shows our debt-to-GDP ratio. And while we did run deficits in the past, we now number our debt in trillions rather than in billions. And I think that represents a long-term danger, especially to the, the American dream.

Slow growth and inflation have a tendency to accompany large deficits and increasing debt as a percentage of GDP.

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

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

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.

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.

If we don't get a grip on government spending, there will be no growth.

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

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.

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?'

For one thing, one of the wonderful things that we now have is instead of the huge budget surpluses that President Clinton left us with, we now have these huge deficits that we're going to be facing into the future.

Our present financial condition is without parallel in history. No nation has ever before been embarrassed from too large a surplus in its Treasury.

A dynamic economy, with more citizens working and paying taxes, will be our strongest tool to bring down budget deficits

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

What would happen if the markets suddenly questioned our ability to keep public finances in check? What would be the effect on growth?

The laws of normal economics dictate that lower taxes combined with increased spending will lead to bigger deficits.

When government borrowing and spending go up, private borrowing and spending go down.

A national debt if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing; it will be powerfull cement of our union. It will also create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.

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.

Look, I don't dispute that the deficit has increased.

Well obviously the economy is critical to everything we do and we need to get the economy back in shape, the deficit down, the debt paid off, so that the economy can grow again and grow properly.

And so we have to be careful with looking at additional stimulus that we don't provoke an increase in the bond rate and then offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got.