Unfunded Liabilities Quotes

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale

That’s what politicians do all the time. They promise you something, they don’t provide the money for it, and then they kick the can down the road and pass on the bill to the next generation.

Congress seems to thrive on breaking promises and passing unfunded mandates down to local government. It's really just a matter of priorities.

If you're a poor worker - this is for new workers coming into the workplace - your benefits will increase at the current rate of increase. If you're a wealthier worker, your benefits would increase at the rate of inflation. And those changes would affect positively the unfunded liabilities inherent in Social Security.

I respect the state workers and I respect their unions, but we simply can't afford to pay benefits and pensions that are out of line with economic reality.

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we've stolen almost $60 trillion from our children.

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.

Tax increases slow economic growth. Why would you raise taxes? We need to reform spending, the tens of trillions of unfunded liabilities can never be funded by tax increases, that can only be fixed by reducing spending.

You know, when companies who have made a commitment and have legacy costs and all of a sudden want to walk away from that commitment and lay it on the federal government, that's a problem. It's a fiscal problem for us.

Social Security and Medicare are necessary safety nets, but they are nearing insolvency as fewer pay in, more take out, and more take out more.

Not only have government bills been dishonored and the interest on the public debt remains unpaid, but … so completely empty is the Treasury and destitute of credit, that funds cannot be obtained to defray the ordinary expenses of the different departments.

Social Security faces financial problems down the road because of demographics.

Raising the traditional and early retirement ages will mean extending workers' taxable earning years, fueling economic growth and putting a dent in our unfunded-liabilities crisis by delaying payouts.

Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note.

Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees.

I would vote against raising the national debt ceiling. Again, this is about mortgaging the future of unborn generations of Americans. It's a form of taxation without representation. I don't think we can do that.

We can’t afford the promises we have already made much less pile more on top of them.

The country has large unfunded liabilities - social security, health care, and there will have to be some adjustments to these problems. What is scary though is how much worse things have gotten in the last eight years, and the Iraq war is one of the main factors.